Moving is not a fun endeavor. It's actually one of those things to be avoided, kind of like having a root canal!   In 23 years of living in Jersey City, I never moved from the same apartment, that's how much I hate moving, that and the fact that it was in a rent control building. 

Ramon had moved around New York City quite a bit. I had lived a short time in NYC, I moved there after graduate school to work for a big famous artist, but that's a different post. 

Our first visit to Laurel was in Oct 2020, that's when we fell in love with Laurel. We came to visit to see what our prospects were and ended up wanting to stay.  It was the people that sealed the deal for us. Some of the nicest folk you will ever meet, so kind and polite. Complete strangers waved of said hello, Ramon would turn to me and say “do we know them”?  It was just something we were not used to, if you did this in NYC they just may think you were crazy.  One of our first experiences in Laurel was waiting in line to get into the famous Pearls Diner, while waiting in line we chatted with a family from South Carolina with whom we are now friends with on Facebook. Once we got our food the place was packed, not even an empty table, we wondered well now what? Where are we going to eat?  We were pretty surprised when 3 different groups of strangers invited us to sit with them.  Right there and right then we knew that Laurel was our home town.

We returned home after a long weekend filled with hopes and possibilities for a new future.  Change is never easy, especially after being in one place for so many years, but we felt the need for something new, something different, what is life without some adventure?  This is when we decided to write a letter to Ben and Erin, not realizing that there is an official way to apply for Home Town.  But this we will explore in a future post. 

We began packing in early January. As you can imagine one accumulates a lot of “stuff” after living in the same space for 23 years. On top of that Jon’s studio occupied one room which overflowed into other rooms of our apartment.  After some FaceTime with the design team from Home Town, they decided that they loved much of our belongings and so we were to pack and mark boxes home town with the items that wanted to use to stage our new home.  We tediously packed our belongings, probably overdoing it as we were afraid that the items might break during transport.  We ended up packing for a total of 4 months! In fact, we were still packing up until the day the shippers arrived. 

The day of the reveal is finally here, we are nervously waiting to see our new home. (More in a future post) 

Now that the cameras are off and the crew has gone home. It's just the 3 of us, Jon, Ramon, and Lady Spencer Buckley in our new home.  It’s Time to unpack, we love everything About our home, it truly exceeded our expectations in so many ways. We feel lucky to have had Ben and Erin use many of our belongings and art to furnish our home.  We really wanted to maintain the design and feeling that they created so we left most of the furnishings as they were, but you always have to add your own touches, that's what makes a home a unique and special place, and creating a home is an ongoing process. I love projects, refinishing furniture, painting a wall, whatever it may be, it is forever in transition, you have to keep surprising yourself. 

Here are some pictures of what our home looks like now. 

In our next post, we will explore what we have done with the rest of the house.