Happy to Be Back in Brooklyn

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By JOYCE COHEN
The New York Times
Published: October 31, 2008

AFTER Finola Keyes and John Wood adopted their daughter, Jillian, from China, they decided it was time for them to leave Brooklyn for the suburbs.

Once they did, they couldn?t wait to return.

Ms. Keyes, a native of Potomac, Md., who once vowed she would never live in the suburbs as an adult, and Mr. Wood, who is from Easton, Mass., met in the mid-1990s through friends. They married in 1997 and, two years later, spent $380,000 on a four-story wreck: a brick row house on Bergen Street in the Boerum Hill Historic District.

Of their $20,000 renovation budget, $17,000 went for plumbing alone. There was no electricity on the upper floors so the previous occupants used extension cords. ?That place was destined to burn to the ground,? Mr. Wood said.

They renovated room by room. Mr. Wood, 44, who owns a technology consulting company, did much of the work.

After Jillian?s arrival three years ago, Ms. Keyes, 42, a travel agent, decided to work part time from home. They also planned to adopt a second child.

In the summer of 2006, they sold the Brooklyn house to friends for $2.075 million and moved to a five-bedroom colonial, circa 1920, in Maplewood, N.J. Their house there cost $930,000. Compared with other places, Maplewood, which reminded them of New England, felt more like a community and less like a bedroom suburb.

Meanwhile, the wait for China adoptions grew to several years. The family still hopes to adopt another child from China but isn?t counting on it.

Their Brooklyn taxes were around $3,500 annually, but in Maplewood they were paying around $23,000. The good schools, they thought, would justify that amount for a family with several children, but ?we could put Jillian in a really nice private school for that,? Mr. Wood said.

And Maplewood didn?t really feel like a community after all. ?We had wonderful neighbors,? Mr. Wood said, ?but it wasn?t the same as being in the city. Everyone got in cars and went somewhere. The only people you saw were running down to the train or jogging or walking their dog.?

Mr. Wood works from home but travels often. Ms. Keyes, alone with Jillian, now 4, felt isolated. ?I underestimated how important the sense of community we developed in Brooklyn was,? she said. ?I missed the restaurants and the green markets.?

Several children from Jillian?s orphanage in China lived in Brooklyn, too, and ?we felt it was important for her to grow up around these girls,? Ms. Keyes said.

She began hunting for a place back in Brooklyn. The family wanted a house, preferably with three bedrooms and a small yard, just enough for a table, chairs and a grill. They expected to pay $1.3 million or a bit more.

Early this spring, they put their Maplewood house up for sale for $895,000, or $35,000 below what they paid for it, ?right as the market was starting to go into a death spiral,? Ms. Keyes said. ?That was a horrendous experience.? There was much interest but only disturbingly low offers.

Yet prices in Brooklyn were still strong. The couple found a lovely brick row house on Bond Street, near their old house in Boerum Hill. But it was expensive for the size, especially since the layout wasn?t ideal. There were two small bedrooms on the top floor, and a master bedroom in the English basement, with no cellar below. (The house sold last summer for $1.445 million.)

They examined a house with a faux-brick facing on Sackett Street in Carroll Gardens. ?That house had nothing going for it but location,? Ms. Keyes said. ?It needed to be gutted.? Mr. Wood nicknamed it ?the Madonna house? after the religious lawn ornament in the basement. They remembered it from years earlier, when it had been displayed out front.

The couple wouldn?t have paid more than $1 million for that house, estimating a cost of $300,000 to $450,000 for renovations. And they would have had to rent somewhere else for a year during construction, another big expense. (That house remains listed for $1.249 million.)

?Feeling really depressed with the state of the market,? Ms. Keyes decided to ?make peace with living in the suburbs,? she said. Then, their New Jersey agent called with an interested buyer. ?So again, the seed was planted that there was a possibility we could get out,? she said.

In midsummer, she spotted an open house listing on Brownstoner.com for a detached Victorian in the Prospect Park South Historic District. The listing was from Mary Kay Gallagher Real Estate. Ms. Keyes had gone to Mrs. Gallagher?s open houses before.

This one was crowded. The house had five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a finished basement, a yard with a fish pond and even a driveway.

The seller, a family needing to relocate to Chicago, had bought the house two years earlier for $1.16 million. Typically, ?you have to do massive renovations because they haven?t been touched since the ?70s or further back,? Mr. Wood said. ?This house had been updated, which is unusual.?

The couple navigated through the crowds. ?I looked at John and said, ?This is going to be the house that got away,? ? Ms. Keyes said.

Only it didn?t get away. They offered the asking price of $1.26 million. (The house, originally listed by the Corcoran Group for $1.595 million, had its price lowered five times over three months.) Taxes are only $4,500 a year.

?It was a fabulous house,? said Mrs. Gallagher, who was glad to see her old acquaintance. ?It had the most modern, updated kitchen I ever saw.?

About five years ago, ?Finola was looking around quite a bit and then she told me they were moving to New Jersey,? Mrs. Gallagher said. ?The next thing I know, she shows up at an open house. They bought that house right away in a hurry.?

After much negotiating, the Maplewood house finally went for $874,000. Ms. Keyes was upset about having to sell at a significant loss but now feels relieved. ?Since then I?ve been watching prices tumbling,? she said of the suburban market.

The family returned to Brooklyn in September. ?In some ways it felt we lucked into this house,? Ms. Keyes said, ?but I spent months stalking real estate Web sites. There was a lot of legwork and a lot of emotional energy.?

E-mail: thehunt@nytimes.com