Making the Move: Brooklyn to Kerhonkson

  |  November 12, 2016
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It’s just a few weeks now ’til we move to Kerhonkson, a “hamlet” with 1,600 people that a Brooklyn friend of mine with a second home there (who loves it!) said, “still has more snowmobiles than farmer’s markets.” Well how did this happen?

The process started at a friend’s wedding in High Falls a few years ago. My husband and I could not believe how beautiful the area was and couldn’t wait to get back.

We love living in Brooklyn. I mean, really love living in Brooklyn. I bought my first apartment at age 23 in Park Slope – a studio for $79,000 on Garfield between 8th and the park, which the real estate agent called, in her thick Russian accent, “a rare opportunity.” It was. A few jobs and moves later landed us in Clinton Hill and its been our very own urban village for the past nine years.

But we kept going back upstate and it slowly started to feel like home also. This spring, I finally did the math and realized how few nights we’d need to rent out a second home to cover our costs – and we began looking for real.

I met a high school friend in Stone Ridge for the weekend and the owner of our Airbnb happened to be a real estate agent, Deborah Hitz, who had sold her loft in Tribeca nearly 20 years ago to buy a 65-acre farm near Stone Ridge. I told her about a house we’d just lost and she said she’d slip a couple listings under our door that night. One of them was on Chipmunk Hollow Road and looked adorable.

Deborah offered to preview the house for us and the way she described it made me skip work and drive up two days later. My husband and I agreed I should make an offer if it looked as good as we thought it would. We pulled the trigger and he was able to see the house the day after our offer was accepted.

So… a whole bunch of legal and other nerve-wracking things later, we were in a contract for real.

And as we moved forward with our plans, we started to daydream about what it would be like to live in our new house full time. To be able to see that beauty every day, to have more quiet and space than we’ve had in ages, to meet new people, to see what happens when we can’t order in every night, and have to actually mow a lawn – to leave Brooklyn, at least for a while.

My husband and I both have jobs where we can work from anywhere and our house in Kerhonkson is wired for high-speed internet. So… Our condo in Brooklyn is officially for rent! The decision is made and we should be full-time “upstaters” by the end of summer.

The house is lovely and has a huge deck and wood-burning fireplace and beautiful gardens – and I’m already dreaming of listening to the stream that cuts through the 5-acre property from our deck with my morning coffee. It cost less than half of what a one-bedroom in our building just sold for.

I think I’m more excited than terrified at the moment, but that changes nearly hourly.  It’s hard to believe that this will actually be my world in the not-too-distant future! Exciting. And terrifying. To be continued…

About Megan Brenn-White

Megan is a writer, marketer, and entrepreneur who founded a company dedicated to helping universities around the world attract more international students. She decided to give up her frequent flier status and plant roots in Kerhonkson, NY with her husband Robert and cat Stinky in the summer of 2016.

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