Intelligencer - Let’s Move to an Old Church Upstate

Cristiana Peña works in historic preservation and always dreamed of finding a church to live in. When the pandemic hit in 2020, she and her partner, Nick Porter, were living together in her rental in a 1920s Tudor-revival building near Prospect Park and started to look for places out of town. “I was just honestly along for the ride for a while,” says Porter. “It was Cristiana’s idea to move. She quickly focused on churches, but I was just assuming it would never happen, but I kind of got onboard more and more as time went on.” They kept getting outbid until they realized they both could work remotely, which meant they could look farther away from the city. “So many times during the process,” Peña says, “Nick would tell me, ‘You know, we could just buy some random house from the 1980s tomorrow and be done with it.’” Then, in the summer of 2022, they found this 3,600-square-foot 1782 church in Granville. It had been vacant for a long time. It would take some work.

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