Lifestyle
Priced Out of the City, They Bought a Tiny Suburban Home. Now What?
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.)
The couple bought a small house on a pretty, tree-lined street in Maplewood and declared it their not-forever home.
If they were going to move to the suburbs, they thought, they might at least enjoy ample space. But the 1923 colonial was roughly 900 square feet, with three tiny bedrooms and a sliver of backyard — smaller than New York City apartments they had occupied. Furthermore, its previous owner, whom Ms. de Beaufort described as “a DIY guy,” had a fondness for murky colors and copious, awkwardly placed storage nooks.
“It was endearing what he did,” she said. “But it wasn’t done right.”
Ms. de Beaufort, who is the director of communications for the architect Daniel Libeskind, could sense the virtues lurking beneath the most regrettable surfaces. Although the house was not overflowing with suburban amenities, its small yard and windowed basement were useful for her side hustle as a botanical dyer. (She imprints items like socks and tea towels with blossoms, and she and Mr. de Beaufort sell them through a company called ADB Botanical Color.)
More to the point, the house had been listed for $265,000 — $100,000 below the family’s budget — so they could afford to give it a face-lift.
Ms. de Beaufort began in the kitchen, which had damaged black-tile counters and jury-rigged wiring that looked ominous. She replaced the misaligned Home Depot cabinets with custom Shaker-style ones, maple plywood for the top set and painted wood for the bottom. (The paint color is the Farrow & Ball pink notoriously called Dead Salmon.) Beneath the wood-patterned linoleum flooring, she found and refinished actual wood. For the new counters, she went with a quartz that resembled terrazzo. By the time she finished, she had spent about $36,000.
In the living room and primary bedroom, she repainted the drab walls white to make the spaces look bigger.
But what to do with the children’s quarters, which were effectively shoe boxes, subdivided from what had once been a single, small room?
As the lockdown made this question more urgent, Ms. de Beaufort consulted a local interior designer named Hollie Velten. Ms. Velten is schooled in the travails of urban expats. Many of her clients are former renters who “are a little overwhelmed with a new acquisition of real estate,” the designer said. “Or they are suddenly second-guessing their decision to move to the boring suburbs and want to make it their own.”
She worked closely with Henry, now 13, and Adela, now 11, on picking the colors and features for their miniature domains.
Henry’s room — so small that he had to climb over the bed to get into it; so small that the tax assessor declined to count it as a bedroom — became a pumpkin-orange cabin with lemon molding and accent patches of sage.
Partly inspired by the opening sequence of “An American in Paris,” where Gene Kelly rearranges furniture and pulls objects out of closets simply to sit down to breakfast in his Left Bank studio, Ms. Velten installed low-key plywood bookcases and shelves that provided storage without calling attention to the crying need for it. On one wall, plywood panels radiate warmth on their own, but also open to reveal a closet and a study nook.
The previous owner had broken through Henry’s ceiling to create overhead storage. Ms. Velten replaced the fixed ladder with a library model that could move aside, allowing access to the closet. Climbing the ladder, one finds a compact loft with a window, where Henry likes to lounge and listen to his collection of vinyl LPs.
“They’re going to be, like, smoking weed up there at some point,” Ms. de Beaufort said.
In Adela’s shoe box, Ms. Velten turned a niche that was formerly a play space into a sleeping area painted the color of purple cauliflower. The niche and surrounding areas include cubbies and inconspicuous storage drawers. In between shelves are flashes of wallpaper from the British company Common Room, patterned with snakes, moons, oysters, coral and clover.
Adela’s “whole idea was to have this mermaid-cottage vibe here,” Ms. de Beaufort said. But she is grateful that her interpretation was sophisticated enough to allow the room to be used for guests once she grows up and leaves home.
Because the couple are now planning to hang around.
They are enjoying the renovated bathroom that Ms. Velten redid with square, sage-green floor tiles and chrome fixtures for an apothecary look. (The total cost for renovating the bathroom and remaking the children’s bedrooms: about $75,000.) They have planted perennials — including indigo — in the backyard for Ms. de Beaufort’s botanical dyeing adventures. And they love Maplewood.
Now that they have put so much thought into the house, “it’s like it’s been customized,” Ms. de Beaufort said. “I don’t want to get rid of it and start again.”
Living Small is a biweekly column exploring what it takes to lead a simpler, more sustainable or more compact life.
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Lifestyle
Looking to the past and future of Black Twitter : Pop Culture Happy Hour
Lifestyle
Dominican Republic Man's Hand Cut Off in Machete Fight, Picks It Up After
Two men got into an old-school sword duel down in the Dominican Republic … and one poor guy lost a hand in the vicious fight, video taken by eyewitnesses shows.
The crazy battle went down Tuesday in San Pedro de Macorís — a small town on the southern part of the island — and the footage of this altercation is absolutely unbelievable … seriously looking like something straight out of a movie.
The two combatants face offer outside a gas station, with machetes and swinging — steel slashing against steel on the sidewalk. They exchange wild hacks, and, at first, it seems like one man may have the advantage as he forces his opponent to the ground.
Somehow, the man on the ground fends off his attacker with a series of kicks and slashes from his back, forcing his way to his knee … and cutting off his opponent’s hand at the wrist.
After his hand’s slashed off clean, the injured man runs away from his attacker … who walks in the other direction — with his shirt completely covered in blood. Despite being down a limb, the maimed man walks calmly to his severed hand, picks it up and heads off on his way.
Local reports cite eyewitnesses who say the men were actually friends … and this war was actually over a woman. The injured man was taken to a local hospital, but it’s unclear if doctors could salvage the hand and re-attach it.
We also don’t know if the other man involved in the altercation will face charges or not.
Lifestyle
Announcing the 2023 College Podcast Challenge Honorable Mentions
The College Podcast Challenge, now in its third year, received nearly 500 entries from students in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Back in March, we announced our 10 finalists, and earlier this month, we shared the story of Michael Vargas Arango, grand prize winner of the 2023 competition.
Beyond these entries, though, we also received 22 podcasts that caught our ears and that our judges thought had a strong story to tell. Here are the honorable mentions.
650 Words by Audrey Auerbach Nelson
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn.
A Hairy Situation by Jane Teran
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.
All I Want for Christmas is an Environmentally Friendly Tree by Amanda Maeglin
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.
Brown Sheep by Isaac Wetzel
Belmont University, Belmont, Tenn.
Bypassers by Aisha Wallace-Palomares
University of California, Berkeley
Cheese Chicanery by Jake Silva
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Colorism in the Pilipinx Community by Malaya Mosqueda
San Jose State University, San Jose, Calif.
Experiencing Freedom Again by Ngan Siu Mei
University of Texas at Austin
How We Live: The Student Athlete Edition by Atavya Fowler
Miami Dade College
It’s Time To BeReal by Pari Goel
Duke University, Durham, N.C.
Juan’s Upon A Time by Juan Miguel Manalo
Miami Dade College
Love Beyond Belief by Jack Lindner
Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind.
Palm Leaves by Suraj Singareddy
Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
Puzzles: Are they still playing with our minds? by Yasha Mikolajczak
University of Missouri-Columbia
Rolling Against Hate with the Homos by Audreyanah McAfee
University of California, Berkeley
Sidelined by Jack Ottomano
Pennsylvania State University
SOS 204 Parking by Juanita Hurtado Huerfano
University of Colorado, Boulder
The History of the Silent Disco by Sam Kohn, Rachel Kupfer-Weinstein and Jacob Sarmiento
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, San Luis Obispo, Calif.
The Sleep Study by Morgan Barela
California State University, Long Beach
The Yellow Wallpaper: An Audio Adaptation by Diego Vazquez, Avery Meurer and Timo Nelson
University of Texas at Austin
Two Ranchers from Mining for the Climate by Juan Manuel Rubio, Nate Otjen, Alex Norbrook, Grace Wang, and Max Widmann. Featuring Rebecca Buck and Lisa Stroup
Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.
UT’s Tower Bells: A Musical Tradition by Shaunak Sathe
University of Texas at Austin
Congratulations everyone! Thanks again for sharing your stories with us. We loved listening to every minute of them. We hope to hear from you again this fall.
NPR’s College Podcast Challenge will return Fall of 2024. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates.
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