We were lost. Driving down a steep, curving road, we were a couple living on the South Shore of Long Island and looking to move away, in a minivan that needed a good wash, rattling with toys and petrified chicken nuggets, smelling of baby wipes and stale, forgotten french fries buried between the car seats. Another day of searching for a home on Long Island’s North Shore. And even though we’d been looking at listings for a while now, and we’d driven all over the area, it was still easy to get disoriented here. That’s the thing about this side of the island: If you get lost in some parts of the North Shore, you can drive a while before there’s a place to pull over. You start out lost in one place and end up more lost somewhere else. The wooded roads dip and turn. Trees slope right down almost to the pavement. Overhead, their limbs braid to make a canopy, and you find yourself driving down a long, leafy tunnel—something you’ll only find in an area where stands of trees have been untouched for hundreds of years.
Some say the North Shore can be a little intimidating. It feels like wilderness. There are big, stately mansions set so far back from the road you can’t see them—on acres of forested land, shielded from view by those old, old trees—but for the outsider driving in, there aren’t really side streets or places to stop and get your bearings. If you’re out for a joyride, with your hand out the window catching air, this place is beautiful and a little wild, untamed. But if you’ve got somewhere to be and get lost, you can only find yourself by pulling into the wide mouth of some elegant, private driveway or driving on until you get to a town and a parking lot.
This was no joyride. We were tired. We had kids to get back to. I think we were discouraged, too. I know I was. Across a search that had gone on for months and months, Frantz and I still hadn’t found a house. We’d been “almost home” what felt like hundreds of times, but the house, The House, still hadn’t happened for us. That sounds like we were picky, like we hadn’t found just the right spa bathrooms or chef’s kitchens or walk-in closets with gilt mirrors and chandeliers, but that wasn’t the case.
The arrival of twins in 2016, two years after the birth of our first son, had left us scrambling for a house that would hold all of us. Don’t get me wrong—the house we had was okay when we were just a couple, but now with three little ones, it was bursting at the seams. We needed a place where we all could spread our wings with room to grow.
Sounds easy enough, right? It wasn’t. Move-in-ready houses were often flipper affairs out of our price range. Houses that needed a little work came closer to the budget. Across months, Frantz and I had visited so many listings full of promise in print. We made a good team. While Frantz (whose approach was numbers-driven, cool, and logical) sized up each house we saw as a financial prospect, I walked through them with different eyes. Frantz was interested in a good deal that we could rework and make our own. I was interested in a house that met our needs as a family that we could make our own quickly. Major renovations in a house with three children under five years old was absolutely not a place I wanted to go. But maybe there was a middle ground: a good house that needed some fixing that could be bought for a deal and “fixed” in stages. Why not see what might be possible? We said that each time.
Though the search could get a little old, somehow we found a way to make the trip to every listing fun. That’s how we kept our spirits up, finding reasons to laugh. We had seen so many houses that we had our own language in the looks we exchanged. We knew our common This is pretty good expressions and our shared No, no, no, no, no, absolutely not faces, even if we didn’t say those in front of the real estate agent. When one of us was trying not to laugh, the other had to turn away to stop laughing, too.
We were experienced skeptics. On the way to a listing that seemed waaaay too good a deal, we might guess, for example, what made the price so low, based on other houses we’d actually seen.
“Tiny house, busy street, maybe.”
“No closets!”
“Or a closet they list as a bedroom!”
“Nine cats have lived there ten years, and it smells like the litter box has never been changed. It’s so bad that . . .”
“. . . you have to walk through the house with your shirt over your nose.”
“There are sheets stapled overhead instead of a ceiling.”
“Walls are falling off the house, but . . . hey, the bathroom has a Jacuzzi!”
“And they’ll be floating rose petals in it when we get there!”
Yes, we’d seen some bad houses, where no one had even tried to make the place appealing. But surprises could be out there, too, we kept thinking. Every listing could be The One. Every house might be The House. The search was always about possibility. After a viewing, we had long conversations in the car, going over the house we’d just visited—what worked for us with that listing, what didn’t, what was nice about it, what sucked, what the issues might be. The search was tiresome, but we still managed to have a great time together. No matter what we did, we believed in laughter. We always tried to incorporate some humor into it. This is still true.
Copyright © 2025 by Jamie Arty. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
