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Welcome to our brownstone in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Come on in. We bought a Brooklyn brownstone for about $1.5 million, and it cost about $300,000 to renovate. So when you first walk into the home, you are in the entryway. You have the original newel post and the vestibule door, and all of the trim work and plaster work right here in one place. Here we are in the living, the parlor floor. This has been the latest renovation of ours. We added in all of the moldings that you see. New base. We built in this little arch over here to separate the kitchen from the living and dining. And you really see a lot of original stuff and a lot of things that we've added here.
All of the plaster crown is original. All of this woodwork is original, but we've also added things. So this fireplace was not here. We actually added this ceiling medallion here as well. We couldn't find the right mirror for above this fireplace. So we built one ourselves. And this is just actually wall tiles. But in front of me is my personal favorite part of the home. And that is this whole window wall over here. One of the largest amounts of work for the restoration project were the shutters. We had to strip all the paint off of them, make sure they're all in working condition. So here we are in the kitchen. When we got this space was carved into a bedroom and a
bathroom that would not have been here originally, of course. And so we opened this space up to make it all the kitchen. This banquette area is definitely one of my favorite spaces in the home. This is all custom built down to the table here. And then over here is one of my favorite places in the entire kitchen because it is our appliance garage and a coffee bar. So now let's head upstairs, disregard the squeaky stairs, but it acts as our alarm system. We have three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and in the back of the house we have our primary bedroom.
This room was inspired by a trip that we went into the English countryside, and we both had this feeling of being totally at rest. And I was like, I need this feeling. In our bedroom off of the primary bedroom, we have the primary bath. We have a double vanity, his and his. We have a really fun toilet seat. And then we have our primary shower with two shower heads. So this is our guest room. And this room actually does not have a window, but it's one of the brightest rooms in the house because it has a huge skylight. This room was inspired not by the English countryside like the room next to us, but the French countryside. We actually were able to go on a trip to see this chateau in the Loire Valley in France, and they found some
original wallpaper in the chateau, and then it was reproduced. And so this is one of the prints that was reproduced. So Barry and I spent a lot of time together. We work together, we live together, and we needed a little space that we can separate. So this is kind of our second hangout room. This built in is new. We built it just with Ikea cabinetry and then custom shelves above it, and then drenched it all in that rich purple color. So one of our favorite rooms in the entire house is our guest bathroom. This is a little tiny room, was kind of a useless bedroom, and we thought it was the perfect size to be a bathroom. So we decided to lean into making this space feel like it was part of the house for, you know, for a long time.
And so we chose tile that's very classic New York City. It's very simple subway tile on the wall, a hex floor right on the floor. This is our wallpaper line that we came out with about a year ago with WallPops that has kind of a little bit of a vintage feel. And we did this vintage door. So we've taken you to the English countryside, the French countryside. Welcome to Italy. This is Sailor's definitely favorite space in our home. This is our backyard. But I think this deck is brand new. We put it in on phase one of our renovation, and we kind of have extra square footage to our home. So going up to the stoop is our duplex, but under the stoop is the entrance to our garden rental unit, which is a one bedroom and one bathroom.
So this is our finished cellar space. It's two levels down from where we were at the parlor floor. There's no natural light, but we got creative, so we put LED strips behind the stained glass just to give the illusion that there is this outside world. And this is where we did a lot of work before we had a studio space for our team. Our laundry room was inspired by my favorite TV show, RuPaul's Drag Race. We both hate doing laundry, and I was like, we need to have a crazy, fun space in order to make this chore fun. We purchased our brownstone in October of 2018 for about $1.5 million. We put down about $500,000, and we paid for the rest
with a mortgage. And now our mortgage payment is about $5,000 per month. We rent out our rental unit on the garden floor for about $2,500 a month. So that means that it pays for about half of our mortgage. Other than our mortgage, expenses on the home are taxes, which are pretty low. We have our home insurance and we have utilities. So Barry and I met on a dating app back in 2017. For me, it was kind of love at first sight. We did a bike ride around Brooklyn, and we found out that we both had this passion for brownstone Brooklyn and kind of developed the plan very early on.
We were going to buy a home together. And I just remember my mom telling me I was crazy, and she was like, do what you want to do, but I need to meet Barry before you make a deal on this. I didn't have any nerves about buying a home together. I think probably just because I bought and sold a few places before we got our place together. After talking and we had a really detailed conversation, a full, honest conversation around finances, I trusted him. So I handed over every single cent that I owned. And the next mission was to find a historic home that we could get our hands on.
We looked around at a lot of neighborhoods when we were looking, but we really kind of settled on Bed-Stuy being the most likely option for us just because it was so beautiful. So we spent a summer, it was the summer of 2017, looking for homes. And we finally found this place after making an offer on another place that we didn't get. But when I first walked into this home, I knew it right away because it had all of those details that we wanted. It had the original features, it had good bones, and we knew that we could do something with it. When we first saw this place, there were bedrooms everywhere. There were walls where there shouldn't be. The kitchen was kind of in the front of the parlor floor, and we really wanted to
kind of strip all of that back, kind of simplify the layout a little bit. We met with a couple of contractors and got quotes, and we quickly had to strategize how we were going to make this possible, because we were getting quotes back for $800,000 up to a mil, and we had a very small renovation budget. So we knew that we were going to have to get our hands dirty, and we don't have a lot of DIY experience. We don't have a lot of restoration experience, but we were excited by the possibility of learning this craft and putting all of our learnings on a blog.
We decided to call it Brownstone Boys. I think we're year eight of our business now. We are now a team of six. We have completed over 32 full gut renovations in New York and Brooklyn, and we just have been nonstop. We started the renovation at the end of 2018, and we were able to complete it probably around the middle of 2019. And then five years into us living in this space, we renovated a couple of spaces in our home, and we just recently completed that I want to say in the last five months. It was about $300,000 for us to renovate and restore our brownstone. I think one of the hardest things about the renovation was the fact that we had to live here during the renovation. The ground floor,
that we called the garden floor, is a separate apartment. And so Jordan and I were able to live there for a lot of the renovation, but because of finances, we needed to rent that space out. So we moved into our space upstairs well before it was finished. I think our advice for people trying to buy a home in New York City is that you need to start small. You know, we would not have this home if I wouldn't have bought my first tiny, one bedroom apartment. We refinanced our mortgage a couple of years ago, and the home appraised for just under $2.4 million. I do see this as being our forever home. We love it so much.
We love this community. I think maybe in X amount of years, maybe 7 to 10, we can look at what another big full gut renovation would look like. Our goal is to set the house up for its next 100 years of life. You know, we're really just stewards of it while we have it. It's going to be here when we're gone, and we want that to be the case.
