I thought I would die in my NYC apartment. I had lived there for nearly twenty years, I outlasted more than a half dozen roommates and the rent was so affordable eventually I was living in a big two bedroom in Williamsburg by myself. When my girlfriend Shannon moved in in 2022 we sort of had this dream of one day owning a home, but obviously we weren’t going to be able to do that in NYC. When my new landlords raised the rent by $800 in one year and $400 the next, I realized it was time to make a change.
In March of 2024 we moved to Wilmington, NC. We kept my office in NYC because I was going back a lot and Shannon somehow is still commuting to work, but we wanted to find a place where we could afford to buy a home. We picked Wilmington because it’s by the beach, Shannon lived there for a few years in the mid 2000s and still has good friends there, but more importantly the housing market was affordable and the property taxes were low. We spent the next year and a half looking for a place to buy.
We both have had this dream of owning a mid century modern home and Wilmington has a ton of them, but they are mostly these small, dark ranch houses that were poorly taken care of and we had nearly given up on the dream and started looking at new construction but it was nothing but depressing grey houses with cold faux hardwood floors and random barnyard doors. At some point we decided to stop wasting our real estate agent’s time and just took a break from looking at houses.
And then one day she sent us a text… This house we had passed by a million times and dreamed of owning was coming on the market. We never thought we could afford it, but just in case we got things ready to make an offer. MCM homes in our price range were going so quickly, we had to be ready. When we finally saw the house we instantly fell in love. It was a proper 1 of 1 architect designed house, with a flat roof and horseshoe shape and rear of the house that cantilevers in two places over a hill. It so well taken car of but it had a lot of problems, but those problems made affordable. It was still significantly more than we had planned to spend, and we are going to spend a lot more renovating it, but if we can fix those problems, if nothing else it should be a great investment.
The home sits above a floodplain and the crawlspace gets water in it every time there’s a hard rain, and given that we live on the coast of North Carolina, there is a lot of rain. There’s a crack in the foundation, there’s a mosquito filled swamp in the back and the stucco needs to be repaired. We have to regraded the side of the house so that the water flows away from the house and encapsulate the crawl space and that’s just the stuff we have to do to make the place safe. We also want to do a lot of little things to make the inside of the house nice. It’s going to take a lot of time, effort and money to get this place to it’s original glory, but hopefully in a few years we will have something really special… assuming it doesn’t sink into the swamp.
I also don’t want to act like I did this on my own. Shannon makes a good living and I had saved up quite a bit of money but we couldn’t have done this without money my parents’ had been saving my entire life to help me buy my first home. My dad worked so hard his entire life and unfortunately he has dementia and will never even know how that paid off. It’s so fucking heartbreaking but I am so, so lucky to have him. My mom is the reason I am a photographer, and my dad is the reason I could take that risk in the first place. I worked my ass off to build a successful photography career, but there’s no way I could have done it without their support.
Right now I am staying with them in Delaware where they retired and I haven’t even seen my home since we bought it. Shannon is going back in a few days and we are going to start working on the crawl space and the foundation, but I am not going to even get to step foot into my home until September 8th. We aren’t going to move in until November, but it was an AirBNB before we bought it, so we had them throw in some of the furniture including a king size bed so I cannot wait get home and sleep there for the first time even though the house smells like wet wood from the goddamn crawl space.