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Living small
Priced Out of the City, They Bought a Tiny Suburban Home. Now What?
The 900-square-foot house had three bedrooms, but the children’s were shoe-box size. Updating them required ingenuity and ideas from “An American in Paris.”
Making the Most of 900 Square Feet
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Much has been written about “good enough” marriages, but what of “good enough” houses in “I guess we have to live somewhere” neighborhoods?
This is the story of a family who began with low expectations and then fell in love.
In 2016, Amanda and Alain de Beaufort were renting an apartment with a garden in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where they had access to a new school with a Spanish/English program for their two children. (Mr. de Beaufort, 49, is from Colombia.) The family had achieved urban-suburban balance in a community they treasured. They were happy.
Then one day, their landlord sold the building for cash and gave them a month to pack up and move out.
“OK, we’ll just buy something in Sunset Park,” Ms. de Beaufort, 46, recalled saying, before making the cruel discovery that no affordable properties remained in the neighborhood. The couple cast their eyes on nearby Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. They flirted with Westchester County.
They did not consider New Jersey. “It wasn’t cool,” Ms. de Beaufort said.
Soon, she was sleeping on the sofas of friends as she house-hunted, while her husband and children bunked at her parents’ home in New Hampshire. In this precarious state, they succumbed to a campaign waged by a friend in Maplewood, N.J., who described that township, about 20 miles west of New York City, as a cross-Hudson-River extension of Brooklyn. (At least one newspaper article has made the same comparison.)
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