REBUILT TO LAST

An ELLE DECOR editor makes the move to renovate her longtime Brooklyn home.

- Ingrid Abramovitch

Rain poured down as movers arrived to empty my Brooklyn home of its contents. Boxes of books went into the truck, along with furniture, kids' school projects, and a lifetime of possessions. A month earlier, my husband, Joel Simon, and I had finally lined up a contractor after a long wait. "I am available," Guillermo Grasso told us, "but only if the apartment is empty of everything, including you, in four weeks." Frantic packing ensued, and we had a surreal moment of seeing our rooms once again as blank slates. We put the cat in her carrier and headed out to temporary digs in rural Connecticut.

Renovation stories often go like this: A new home is bought and in comes the wrecking ball. But what if the home is one you already know and love-and don't want to leave? We found our apartment two decades ago-a two-bedroom duplex in an 1870s brownstone-when our elder daughter, Ruby, was a baby, and our younger daughter, Lola, was not yet born. The apartment had all the period features I crave: original decorative moldings, pressed-tin ceilings, wide-plank wood floors. So what if the windows rattled, the radiators hissed, and our two girls shared a bedroom with a layout like a bowling alley?