Sizing Up to a House in Jersey City: How Much Work Was Too Much?

October 2020 was a huge thirty day period for Emily Oppenheimer and Julian Agin-Liebes. They had been married in a park in Jersey City, N.J., in advance of a handful of shut good friends and family. Dr. Agin-Liebes, a neurologist, learned he experienced been positioned at the Columbia University Irving Health-related Center for his fellowship education. And the couple, now armed with excess money from their scaled-down pandemic wedding ceremony, decided it was time to put down roots.

Ms. Oppenheimer, 35, and Dr. Agin-Liebes, 34, had moved to Jersey City from Harlem in 2017, leasing a two-bedroom downtown. They liked the building’s rooftop garden and the proximity to the Route train. Ms. Oppenheimer, a application manager for a New York City community-health and fitness heart, experienced found out her inexperienced thumb when she moved to New Jersey, getting on the role of gardener for the constructing. Then the pandemic turned the communal room into a restricted 1, with time scheduled in advance.

“As considerably as we liked sharing, all through Covid everyone bought a tiny possessive about their outdoor time,” Dr. Agin-Liebes said. “And we were each working from dwelling, sharing this one particular desk.”

They hoped to discover a house with some character, but were to begin with discouraged by what they found for their $750,000 spending plan — too several illustrations of the so-called “Bayonne box,” the chunky, usually vinyl-clad multistory condominium structures typical in Jersey City and neighboring Bayonne, N.J.

“No shade, but it was not really what we preferred,” Ms. Oppenheimer claimed. “It has a garage and it is properly fine, but it is all that was offered in our price vary.”

[Did you recently buy or rent a home in the New York metro area? We want to hear from you. Email: [email protected]]

They didn’t want to stay in downtown Jersey City, which, in spite of its usefulness, had begun to experience too congested. They hoped to get in or around the Jersey Town Heights neighborhood, exactly where they preferred to go out to take in, pay a visit to their most loved bicycle shop and just take in the Manhattan skyline from Riverview-Fisk Park.

“We were being like, ‘Why do we preserve coming listed here to do the points we want to do? Let’s imagine about dwelling below,’” Dr. Agin-Liebes explained.

By means of a mutual close friend, they connected with Katrina Spiratos, a authentic estate agent with Corcoran Sawyer Smith, and invested several months scouring the spot for households in their cost assortment with the proper blend of character and out of doors space.

Amid their selections:

Come across out what took place subsequent by answering these two questions:

Leave a Reply