Searching for a Fixer-Upper

Featuring Susan Little’s sale:

 

Karen Asprea grew up in Bensonhurst and Marine Park, Brooklyn, and studied interior design at Pratt Institute. She moved briefly to Murray Hill in Manhattan, but a little over a year ago, she returned to Brooklyn. There, she rented a one-bedroom in Park Slope for $2,350 a month, primarily as a base for hunting for a place to buy.

Ms. Asprea planned a renovation of whatever she bought. “I wanted to be nearby while I renovated so I wasn’t running back and forth,” she said.

With a budget in the low $600,000s, she knew a one-bedroom would be small, so she wanted some kind of outdoor space, even if just a tiny balcony. She wanted a dishwasher and a washer and dryer, too.

“I don’t like dishes in the sink and don’t always have time to wash them right away,” said Ms. Asprea, 32, who is the director of Whitehall Interiors, an interior-design firm. As for laundry, she had been sending it out or periodically carting it to her mother’s house in Marine Park.

She found a bright 400-square-foot one-bedroom in a lovely prewar building near Grand Army Plaza in Park Slope, listed for $387,000. Monthly maintenance was around $600. “The block was enchanting,” she said, with rowhouses “looking like little castles.” But the tiny bedroom was “unrealistically small,” she said — just six and a half feet wide. The co-op board would let her move a wall and add a sliding partition. But a structural engineer told her the wall she needed to move was load-bearing and thus alterations couldn’t be made.

Later, farther south in Park Slope, she visited a duplex studio loft of around 700 square feet in a small condo building. It included a small balcony. The listing price was $625,000, with monthly charges in the mid $200s. She loved the open space and the balcony. But “the finishes were fairly new,” she said. “They were not my taste at all.”

The interior could easily be renovated. She was more concerned with the location of the sleeping area, just beneath the roof. “During the summer it would be incredibly hot and I would have to install a secondary air-handling system,” she said. The apartment later sold for $605,000.

“That place wasn’t for her,” said the listing agent, Susan Little, a saleswoman at the Corcoran Group. “It didn’t need a thing.” Ms. Asprea decided to continue the hunt with Ms. Little’s help.

“You can make no assumptions and no judgments until you are physically standing inside a space,” Ms. Asprea said. Pictures were deceptive, she said. “Everything is taken with a wide-angle lens.”

Nor did pictures show anything but the inside of a unit, and maybe a building’s exterior. “You aren’t seeing the dingy basement or the broken windows or the common spaces,” she said. “Once you get there and all senses are engaged, that can make or break a place, too.”

Ms. Asprea instructed Ms. Little: “Show me the scary apartment nobody else is going to buy because they are afraid of a gut renovation.”

Last spring, a one-bedroom with a backyard became available in a small prewar condo building in South Park Slope.

“It was a whisper listing, which means it wasn’t a full-blown marketing launch,” Ms. Little said. The listing agent was showing it for an hour. “It was an apartment in estate-sale condition that needed everything,” Ms. Little said. “It was old, old, old.”

The price was $579,000, with monthly charges of just under $500. “I saw the potential,” Ms. Asprea said. She immediately offered the asking price, which was accepted.

A month later, in San Juan, P.R., for a friend’s bachelorette party, she met Ronald Masso Ferret, 33, at a bar. He was an interior designer, too, as well as a contractor. They hit it off and planned for him — and his dog, Dara — to join her in New York.

Her apartment had been intended as a one-bedroom for one person. “What kind of cosmic joke is this?” she said. “It’s like somebody put a tornado in my life.” He helped design the interior. Ms. Asprea apologized profusely to the neighbors for the disruption and had the work done as quickly as possible. The couple arrived in the fall.

Ms. Asprea learned a few design lessons along the way. In the bathroom, she used a fixed piece of glass in front of part of the shower, instead of a shower door.

But the stall is so narrow that water splashes out of the opening to get in and out. She plans to add a door.

She also planned a shower head “at a normal human height, but I had to move it up eight inches to accommodate Ronald.”

The stacked washer and dryer are behind a pocket door in the hall. “I am in laundry heaven,” Ms. Asprea said. “I tell my friends who don’t have washer-dryers, ‘Do your laundry here.’ I can offer that now.”

Copyright © 2016 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Danny Chitis/The New York Times. 

Please click here to read the article on nytimes.com