Suddenly Suburban: A Pandemic Tale
Let’s take a little trip back in time to February 24, 2020. I’m celebrating my 33rd birthday at one of my favorite West Village spots, Marie’s Crisis, a historic piano bar where the drinks are affordable and the singing is LOUD. One of my dearest friends is a pianist there, and I am just so happy to be surrounded by friends, singing Sondheim, and drinking an unknown amount of white wine. It’s a magic New York City night where everything is just right, and it does not escape me what a perfect fit the life I have crafted thus far in NYC is in that moment. I have recently wrapped up a transformation on our rent-controlled apartment in Park Slope, where we plan to stay for a good long while. My fiance and I are planning a wedding for the following summer, and I’m doing things like having a custom outfit built by the coolest designer whose studio is in an old factory building in Gowanus. Professionally I’m on a roll, and after years of pounding the pavement and cobbling together the most bizarre and sometimes frightening combination of work, I have a steady stream of quality projects that just keep growing. It’s been 7 years since I landed in NYC with no job, a sublet that was right above STOMP the musical with an enormous wooden fish on the wall, and a heart and spirit that while hopeful were also frankly shattered. The 7 years it took to get to a night like Feb. 24 2020 were long, winding, and grinding, ups and downs-mostly downs, too many random roommates to count, 6,572 first dates (you know what I mean), and a whole lot of credit card debt. BUT I was here, I was happy, I was singing show tunes, and all would be well…
So I’m not going to bombard you with details about the beginning of my pandemic experience, partially because we all have our stories and mostly because I left NYC only a few weeks into lockdown to go stay with family for “just a little bit,” and the immense amount of compassion and in a bizarre way wonder I have for those who stayed in the city throughout the entirety of this time completely outweighs my understanding of what it meant to be in NY during this pandemic.
What I will share is a quick overview of how we decided to move to Alexandria, VA, where we are now. After two weeks of not leaving our 600 sq ft apartment (which only had one door to the bathroom in it – hello zoom calls) along with wild rumors of bridges and tunnels closing, my now husband and I decided to rent a car from Hertz and drive to Ohio to go stay with family for two maybe three weeks. Two months later we decided it was time to check on our apartment and give our family a bit of their house back. On the drive home, we stopped through Alexandria where good friends live to do our first “covid friend bubble.” We were desperate for friend time, and a change of scenery. While in Alexandria it was time to face the music that lockdown wasn’t ending any time soon, so plans needed to be made. We officially canceled our wedding that was supposed to be in Hawaii that summer (a real bummer), and we needed to figure out where to live – our Park Slope apartment just wasn’t viable for the both of us to work out of. While searching for affordable rentals outside of NYC in Connecticut or upstate (which didn’t exist because EVERYONE was doing this), it hit us that maybe we didn’t need to live within commuting distance of NYC during this time? Jump to us finding a very tiny townhouse in Alexandria for an unbelievably affordable price that we figured we would be in for say three, four months max. We made the decision to officially sign the lease on our drive back into NY to check on the apartment, which then turned into packing the apartment and pulling away in our U-Haul one week later. As we settled into our temporary little rental house for an undetermined amount of time as the world stood still and chaos continued to swirl, life also somehow continued to press on. We kept our original wedding date and swapped our destination bash for a very small backyard ceremony. Then what do you know – I became pregnant.
I don’t have to tell you that some rearranging of life and things happen when a new human joins the party, and with COVID still very much in peak scary mode (no vaccines, etc), a little more space and room to breathe felt like the fit. So we bought a house! We bought a house in the exact neighborhood of the friends we initially came to visit and who hosted our makeshift wedding in their backyard. When you’ve been renting in NYC without any plans to leave, buying a house with thousands of square feet for less than a million dollars makes you feel like your living arrangements have suddenly hit Daddy Warbucks status. We live in a townhouse so while our outdoor space is a small paved courtyard – you could tell me I live on a farm and I wouldn’t know the difference. To say I was excited to design a whole house that I owned for my new family of three is the understatement of the century.
Everything about our new life still feels a little odd and unfamiliar to me, such as the amount of space we have in the house, the style of the architecture is far more traditional than anything I ever thought I would live in, driving a car every day…but don’t get me wrong buying large boxes of La Croix at Target and hauling it home in my Prius is BLISS. Our house is a charming townhouse with white-washed brick and a stoop I can hang out on with my son where we can point out dogs and stuff like that toddlers like to do. The house was built in 1969, which comes with some real perks in my opinion. I’ve always been an old house gal, and so the hardwood floors, crown molding, and wood-burning fireplaces were MUCH appreciated. I actually always assumed that my first home purchase would be an absolute fixer-upper, this could not have been less the case. Being that we had a newborn son (like three weeks old new), it just wasn’t the time in life to fully renovate. The house was in pristine condition, as the former owners had taken such beautiful care of it, the finishes simply weren’t my style, and there wasn’t an inch of wallpaper to be found!
So here I was ready to embark on the transformation of this home and found myself facing the laundry list of obstacles and decisions that I work with clients on every day all day, the main hurdle of course being budget. Now, this is something I want to be really honest about, because in this industry I think there is a real lack of transparency when it comes to talking about JUST HOW MUCH decorating a home costs. To this point I had only ever designed NYC rental apartments for myself, which means a.) you simply don’t need that much stuff to fully design a small home, and b.) because I knew my time in these spaces inevitably would have an expiration date, I never had any desire to spend that much on pieces and materials unless I knew I could utilize them in the future. This home however was the opposite scenario in all regards, while this house probably isn’t our forever home, it’s somewhere we will most definitely be for a solid chunk of time, and in owning it, it’s an opportunity to have the work correlate with the value of the house itself.
I started off the process by making a “realistic dream list” of projects I would like to do in the house, things like “furnish the entire house,” and re-tile the entry landing. I knew I obviously couldn’t afford to fully renovate the kitchen, but maybe I could swing getting the cabinets professionally repainted. I brought over my contractor (Luxor Improvements) who I work with in the DC area, to walk through a hopeful punch list, and he in return provided me with an itemized price list. My husband and I decided we were able to spend up to 25 thousand dollars on construction fees (this is just the labor – not the materials), and as such, we edited down the list to include a logical combination of must-haves and eliminated things like built-in window seat cabinets in my son’s nursery that ultimately just didn’t make the cut.
Below is the final scope of work I landed on alongside a look at where we started in each room. The list below reflects an amount of work on the home I felt could meaningfully transform the space for the least amount of money possible, all while keeping as many features of the home as they stood.
Common Space:
- Wallpaper Walls & Ceiling
- Eliminate Can Lighting
- Add Two Flush Mounts
- Swap Chandelier
- Paint Stairwell
- Furniture & Decor
Kitchen:
- Move Ceiling Lighting Locations & Swap Fixtures
- Wallpaper walls
- Stove Hood (we kept the existing one and built a decorative box around it to save some money!)
- Paint Kitchen Cabinets
- Cabinet Hardware
- Furniture & Decor
Entry:
- Floor Tile
- Wallpaper Walls
- Paint Front Door
- Swap Ceiling Light
- Furniture & Decor
Primary Bedroom:
- Remove Built-in Bookcase
- Wallpaper Walls
- Swap Ceiling Light
- Furniture & Decor
Nursery:
- Wallpaper Walls & Ceiling
- Swap Ceiling Light
- Furniture & Decor
Guest Room:
- Wallpaper Walls
- Furniture & Decor (this room we used all previously owned furniture with the exception of one chair I purchased for $3 at Goodwill)
Den:
- Wallpaper Walls
- Paint Fireplace Brick
- Replace Sliding Door with French Doors
- Carpet
- Swap Ceiling Light
- Furniture & Decor
What ensued next was a tireless series of months crafting the design and sourcing materials and furnishings in the most cost-effective and clever way possible. I lived at my local thrift stores, scoured Facebook Marketplace endlessly, and connected with some truly excellent vendors who were interested in collaborating with me thus enabling me to receive some amazing pieces and product for a lot less than if I were purchasing off the shelf.
You don’t need me to tell you that the last few years have been unprecedented with expedited decision-making, moves, and life choices at a rapid-fire pace, and landed us all in completely unfamiliar territory. While my ability to pick up and move and shift my environment to the changing needs of our family was and is a privilege I am well aware of, the uncertainty of this new lifestyle and surroundings hasn’t been without its challenges. Working through the creation of this home I have learned a lot about myself, how I relate to design on a truly personal level, and what maybe needs to change in the future. Stay tuned as I share the finished space and all that went into it!
Opening Image Credits: Design by Megan Hopp | Photo by Kelsey Ann Rose
THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED HERE.
