When we started working on the house back in 2017 my friends told me we should put the process on Instagram.

The words were, if I remember correctly, something, something, content, brands, sponsorship, money, which is exactly the opposite of how I think about what is valuable to me.

That, coupled with the fact that at that time I didn't even have an Instagram or even any social media at all, provoked a pretty defiant absolutely not. I recognized, too, that having to document what we were doing while we were doing it would add another full time job on top of the two mega jobs I already had, namely working on the house AND working the job I actually got paid for.

Plus, that's not why we were doing any of this. As artists with a desire to live long term in nyc we had our eyes trained with deadly focus on making life sustainable in one of the most expensive cities in the world. We wanted to be able to survive while making the quite non-commercial work we wanted to make, protected from the impulses of any market.

So that's the brief we started with: build a home that could nurture our art, for not much money. The whole thing from start to finish has been - and still is - a story of using creativity, sweat, and unshakeable determination to make do. We are not the kind of people who gut and replace. We believe in rehabbing, preserving, and building upon what is good that already exists.

So now we hope to share what we've done, and what we've learned along the way. We hope there are people out there who will find it interesting, and even instructive. Here we go!