When Crissy Spivey bought herself a large one-bedroom, one-bath co-op in Brooklyn\u2019s Ditmas Park neighborhood in 2018, she had all the space she needed. Shortly before she closed, she met John Richie, who had just moved to New York from New Orleans. Before long, he joined her in the apartment.<\/p>\n
The following year, the couple\u2019s daughter was born and they transformed the place into a two-bedroom with a small office. During the winters, they were joined by Ms. Spivey\u2019s mother, Annie Spivey, who lives most of the year in Syracuse, N.Y.<\/p>\n
[Did you recently buy a home? We want to hear from you. Email: thehunt@nytimes.com<\/a>. Sign up here<\/a> to have The Hunt delivered to your inbox every week.]<\/p>\n Having tripled, and sometimes quadrupled, the population in the apartment, Ms. Spivey and Mr. Richie felt increasingly cramped. They craved more room, another bathroom and even a little outdoor space.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve lived in New York for 22 years and never had a stoop to sit on \u2014 nothing more than a bench,\u201d said Ms. Spivey, who works in advertising. \u201cI never even had a fire escape that felt safe enough to stand on.\u201d<\/p>\n So they decided to search for a single-family home, setting a budget of up to $900,000. The couple, both in their mid-40s, hoped to remain in or near Ditmas Park. They knew they couldn\u2019t afford one of the neighborhood\u2019s gorgeous Victorian houses. But they wanted to be close to their daughter\u2019s school and the Q train.<\/p>\n Even the places they could afford needed a lot of work. \u201cWe saw things that were like a time capsule,\u201d said their agent, Rachel Skumanich of Compass.<\/p>\n Ms. Spivey did much of the online hunting, while Mr. Richie pounded the pavement. \u201cI would go through some of the neighborhoods and look for for-sale signs,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Off-street parking was an important detail. During the pandemic, the couple bought a car so they could drive to Syracuse and New Orleans. Now they use it to chauffeur their daughter to assorted activities. \u201cIf you have swim lessons over here or dance lessons over there, it\u2019s hard with public transportation,\u201d said Mr. Richie, a documentary filmmaker who is in graduate school to become a therapist.<\/p>\n As they hunted, they also needed to stage their apartment for sale and clean up for every open house, which they found stressful. \u201cWe had to remove the life from our life,\u201d Ms. Spivey said.<\/p>\n Find out what happened next by answering these two questions:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Crissy Spivey bought herself a large one-bedroom, one-bath co-op in Brooklyn\u2019s Ditmas Park neighborhood in 2018, she…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53951,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[29759,29757,29758,9,24,55,54,56,578],"class_list":["post-53950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-ditmas-park-brooklyn","tag-flatbush-brooklyn","tag-midwood-brooklyn","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-real-estate-and-housing-residential"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}