Bed Stuy's Brownstone Boys Share Old-House Love, Reno Tips in First Book

When you know, you know. After a first date, things progressed quickly for Barry Bordelon and Jordan Slocum: They bought a brownstone in Bed Stuy seven months later. They started blogging about their renovation under the name Brownstone Boys in 2018, and an outpouring of questions from fellow Brooklynites renovating their own fixer-uppers soon led to their first design and project-management gig for a client.

Fast forward several years, scores more projects, an expanded team of seven, television appearances, and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media later. Their book, “For the Love of Renovating,” published in June by Union Square & Co., shares what they have learned to help others transform their own homes (whether old or new).

Illustrated with photos of their projects, the book is both practical and inspirational, drawing on Bordelon’s and Slocum’s years of experience working with clients and homes. Chapters cover how to buy a fixer-upper, designing, and renovating specific rooms and features such as kitchens, baths, windows, and trim.

The interview has been edited and condensed.

Where are you from and how did you wind up in Brooklyn? Have you always loved old houses?

Slocum: I grew up in Las Vegas watching Sesame Street-like shows as a kid. I always wanted to live in an old house because we didn’t have them growing up. That’s what inspired me to move to New York City. In Prospect Heights, I rented the same apartment for 16 years and always dreamed of owning a brownstone. I would walk around and admire how beautiful they are and wonder about what was inside.

Bordelon: I’m from New Orleans originally so I always had a passion for old houses. The architecture in New Orleans was always one of my favorite things about living there. I couldn’t see living in a place that didn’t have that. I really enjoyed [living in] Boston, and then I moved to New York and loved that even more, and it has been home ever since.

Did you have construction experience?

Bordelon: I went to architecture school but didn’t finish, I got a business degree and went into software sales but I never lost my passion for architecture and design. I scraped together every penny for my first one-bedroom apartment, did some renovations, then sold it. I enjoyed that process, that was fun, I made some money by fixing up an apartment and selling it. Then I bought another one and did the same thing. Then I bought two more places. When Jordan and I bought our house, it was my ninth closing.

Slocum: I was hired by a food company on the business side. They outsourced the architecture and the building, then I would project manage from the ideation to the opening of a shop. I made sure all the orders were on time. It was exciting, we opened 15 shops together. And I became very familiar with how the Department of Buildings works and what is needed to meet code. Then when I met Barry I had the opportunity to [put that experience to use] when renovating our own home.

Bordelon: We had experience but it still didn’t prepare us for what we needed to do when renovating our own house. Shutters, newel post, paint stripping, plaster restoration – there were so many things we didn’t know how to do. The place where we got the most information about that stuff was on other blogs we could find, other people who were going through what we were going through. That’s when Jordan had the amazing idea – I’ll never forget – after I sold my last apartment and we were about to close on this house – Jordan said we’re getting all this information from people who are doing it, why don’t we create our own blog and share our journey and what we’re learning. We got the keys to our house and created our first post with a picture of us on the stoop with our keys.

What is your biggest piece of advice to someone who wants to buy a Brooklyn brownstone?

Bordelon: You might have to buy something else before you buy a brownstone. Start with an apartment, get yourself a one-bedroom or two-bedroom apartment. You might have to climb the property ladder a little bit. There are a finite number of brownstones. A lot of people want them and there is a lot of competition for them, the market is very strong, even if it’s a fixer-upper. It was my goal for a very long time, as I was buying apartments. The apartments I bought I always lived in. I would stay for two years and fix it up while I lived there. That was always my goal: I knew I wanted a brownstone. A big perk to owning a building like this is a lot of times it’s a multi-family house. You can think about that and finances, the down payment, the mortgage, there is often another unit you can rent out that offsets that mortgage a lot. That’s why it was always an attractive investment to me. We rented the garden apartment in our house before we finished the renovation and our tenant is still with us, seven years later.

What would you say to someone who is considering buying a fixer-upper?

Bordelon: It’s only at most 99 percent done, there’s always something, it’s an old house, you’re never really done, as much as you want to finish. That’s one of the beauties is that you get to keep improving and maintaining it. One thing we love to do is we feel good about setting up the house for its next 100 years of life. I feel really good about working on these houses and making sure they’re going to be here for a long time.

Do things sometimes not go as planned? What is your advice for clients when that happens?

Bordelon: Go in with the expectation it will be a roller coaster ride, there will be ups and downs. You will go in very excited. The design work is fun, choosing colors and finishes is fun. Demo starts, then there will be some low points, and things will move slower in parts. If you know the downs are coming, it makes it easier. When something happens – we discover joists were cut or it’s going to cost more to replace something – clients are like now we get it. It makes it easier when you set expectations for that to happen.

The book is informed by your experience with clients and their questions and projects. Did you find it challenging to write the book or did it feel like it practically wrote itself?

Slocum: We’re lucky we’re a duo, we followed the course of a project and we divided and conquered even with the book. Barry wrote a chapter, I wrote a chapter, we discussed it and went back and edited it.

Bordelon: We did have experience writing with our blog, so we literally wrote a blog post a week for a couple of years. We used a lot of that experience to write the book. We were really surprised: A book agent reached out to us and said you should write a book. She helped us understand what we needed to do to write the proposal. We thought if we got a deal we’d get a ghost writer, [but then] we decided to go for it and do it ourselves. There’s so much technical stuff, we would have had to explain so much to someone else, it would have taken longer. It was an enjoyable experience and we enjoyed writing it.

What is your favorite project?

Slocum: The carriage house was a special project because it was unlike the brownstone renovations we’d done. We did a lot of research on the history, and learning that backstory was really special. The Gates House also holds a special place in my heart because it was our largest project and the clients wanted to do everything possible they could to save everything that was original in that house.

Bordelon: We did everything from stained glass to plastering to medallions to jacking up the staircase so it wasn’t leaning crooked. Usually people replace it – but we wanted to keep the original but still straighten it out. We tried to save the original hardwood floors and we sanded them but unfortunately [they couldn’t be saved]. So we made that effort so we didn’t feel bad but we replaced them with something that looks like it belongs in a 150-year-old house – diagonal oak with inlaid borders. There were places where fireplaces had been removed and we got vintage mantels and put them back in. We definitely left that house much closer to its original state than when we found it.

What is next, what are your plans for the future?

Slocum: We’re getting married this October on our stoop, we’re closing the street.

Are you going on a honeymoon?

Bordelon: We are taking two weeks off, which thinking of the amount of projects we have seems insane. We still haven’t fully planned it but we’re going to Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in the Spring/Summer 2024 issue of Brownstoner magazine.

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