New Jersey Couple Spends 5 Years Renovating $435,000 House, Selling It for

The couple initially planned to continue renting, so they started looking at one-bedroom and one-and-a-half-bedroom apartments in the area.

“As we looked at different apartments, we realized how expensive they were. In many cases, they were the same price as having a mortgage if we were to buy a house,” Rogers told Insider. “So we started looking to buy a house instead.”

Both of them were working in Manhattan back then and their priority was to have an easy commute to their offices that took less than 40 minutes, Rogers said. Her husband is a software engineer and she works in healthcare.

“We basically took a map and started drawing little circles around the different train stations and looking at the towns with direct trains,” she added. “That’s how we found Bloomfield — the town we live in now. And we liked it because it has a 30-minute direct train to Manhattan as well as Hoboken.”

“I was in our apartment in Jersey City, scrolling Zillow, when we saw our current home come up,” Rogers said. “It was just an outside photo of the house and looked like a photo from someone’s phone — it wasn’t even a professional photo.” 

Right then her phone rang: It turns out that Gesualdo, who was on his commute home from work, had spotted the listing at the same moment she did and was calling to tell her about it.

“It was a moment of fate,” Rogers said.

Gesualdo went on his own to view the house with their agent first, she said. The couple agreed that if he liked it, then Rogers would take the train from work to the house to see what the commute was like.

“It was such an easy commute. I get off the train, I walk two blocks down the street and I see the house. We both instantly decided that this was it,” she added.

“We have this very ornate staircase with lots of spindles,” Rogers said. “And on our first floor, we have these inlay wood floors with detailed borders.”

The floors in each room have a different design and it was unlike any other house that they’ve seen before, she said.

“The house is a Dutch Colonial Revival and I’ve had a few people from the Netherlands ask me what makes it Dutch,” Rogers said. “Honestly, the only thing that makes it Dutch is that the style of home was built by Dutch settlers in New Jersey and New York.”

This style of house has a very distinct gambrel roof that resembles that of a barn, with interiors set like an American Foursquare, she said.

“There are no long hallways or anything like that. It’s just four rooms. We had toured bigger houses, but this house feels larger than it is because of the layout,” she added.

“I think in the past 20 years alone, we are the fifth family that has owned the house,” Rogers said. “You could tell different renovations that people did in different time periods, so it was a mishmash kind of style.”

The couple already knew that they wanted to renovate the house when they moved in, and this gave them an opportunity to restore some of the features that the previous occupants had torn out or boarded over.

“We wanted to be able to make the house feel a bit more like ours,” Rogers added.

They weren’t intending to DIY anything at first, but changed their mind…