The Brownstone Boys have some renovation tips for you

By Brian Braiker

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If you live in Brooklyn and have ever had a desire to renovate or restore your place, whether it’s a total overhaul or a new kitchen — or just to upgrade some shelving, or a rethinking of your lighting — chances are you’ve come across The Brownstone Boys. Or if you live in Brooklyn and just have a kink for historic home restoration, you’ve probably followed The Brownstone Boys either on Instagram or YouTube, Pinterest or TikTok.

The Brownstone Boys are Jordan Slocum and Barry Bordelon. They are a couple who live in Bed-Stuy and gained a following when they started blogging their own journey of restoring the house they bought in 2018. From there, the simple online diary of their progress morphed into a full-fledged online brand and then an interior design and renovation firm that has undertaken 26 restoration projects and counting. It’s spawned TV appearances and now a book, “For The Love of Renovating: Tips, Tricks and Inspiration for Creating Your Dream Home” out this month.

This week, The Brownstone Boys join us on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” to talk about all of the above. The book is a nitty-gritty, yet beautifully designed approach to tackling that renovation or restoration project you’ve had in the back of your mind for weeks, months, years. We talk about their own story, their weirdest restoration discoveries, renovation dos and the don’ts and more.

The following is a transcript of our conversation, which airs as an episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast,” edited for clarity. Listen in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.

Let’s get to your origin, sort of described who you guys are, what you do in the intro, but this all started in 2018, The Brownstone Boys brand, I guess when you bought your first house together. It’s what, a 130-year-old brownstone in Brooklyn. Is that where you’re sitting right now with your very artfully appointed backdrop?
Jordan Slocum: Yes, that is it. We are here in Bed Stuy Brooklyn, and you’re right, our story started in 2018. Barry and I bought a project, a brownstone built in 1890 after 8 months of dating each other.

That’s insane in and of itself.
Slocum: It was insane and it was the only way that we can make buying a brownstone happen is if we put both of our savings in together and buy this fixer-upper, this huge project, and we were very, very new in our relationship.
Barry Bordelon: We really got to know each other. The foundation of our relationship was doing a renovation together of a historic home. So a lot of people say if you can make it through that, you can make it through anything. So hopefully that’s the case.

I know plenty of couples with more than eight months under their belt that couldn’t survive a reno like that, so that’s very impressive.
Bordelon: A good way to get to know each other really quickly.

So in that renovation process, what was one thing that surprised each of you about the other, either pleasantly or unpleasantly?
Slocum: I always knew Barry was a man of patience. I think it’s his Southern upbringing, but I was really marveled at how patient he was and we learned that the hard way when I was freaking out over the wood stripping process that we took on ourselves, and we stripped a quarter of our stair banister and I was freaking out and very emotional and Barry was like, “We’re getting through this, and just breathe and relax.” I think it was our first, what could have been our major fight, but his patience segued through the entire stripping process.
Bordelon: I had previously renovated several apartments so I was used to going through the process, the ups and downs, dealing with the contractor, that sort of thing. For Jordan, it was his first home purchase, so he before that was a renter and lived in the same rental for a very, very long time. So it was something new to him and he was just really open to it and really even moving to a new neighborhood, going through this major renovation, we had to live in a smaller part of our house while the rest of the house was being renovated. So he was just really open to that and game for it and up for learning how to go through this crazy process. And so I really admired that about him.

It’s incredible and really the reason the book exists because I can’t change a light bulb without freaking out.
Slocum: I’m like you, Brian.

I couldn’t imagine stripping floors and deciding I can do this without any sort of training. And not only do it, but do it well. I can see your house. It looks like pros did it. And I guess this gets to also your origin as The Brownstone Boys is that you are blogging this as it’s happening, starting to gradually form a community. What was the moment where you’re like A, let’s document this, and B, that tipping point where you’re like, oh, we have an audience here?
Bordelon: We both had a little bit of a background in design and renovation. Like I said, I renovated several apartments, bought my first one-bedroom apartment, renovated it myself, did like DIY stuff to it, sold it, did well with it, did another place, did more renovations to it. And I did that a few times before we bought our house and Jordan did commercial design or ice cream shops and bakeries.

So you’re not totally, totally new to this?
Slocum: No, not too new at it. When we purchased our house, we both had so many questions about historic restoration and we just weren’t finding the answers to our questions. The things that were helpful were personal stories from other blogs that we were reading. Unfortunately, they were all outside New York, so the specific information was still a challenge to find. So I suggested to Barry, “Let’s start a blog that hopefully this will be a helpful resource for anybody else going through our process.” Immediately after we published our first blog when Barry told me that only our friends and family will be [reading] this blog, so don’t think too much about it. Brownstoner reached out to us, which a website that we had been following for years and years, and they asked if they could run our blog post. So A, it motivated us to keep our blog going, but it also put us in front of our community here in Brooklyn, which was just mind-blowing. Because of Brownstoner, people were reaching out left and right asking us specific questions around their restoration project here in New York.

Shout out to Brownstoner. I check them probably at least once a week. It’s a great resource and it’s interesting that you say that because oh yeah, there are other sites and things with advice, but nothing specific to New York. What makes New York or Brooklyn specifically unique in terms of historic homes?
Bordelon: Well, we’re dealing with, first of all, a historic home that has a lot of original details and features that we wanted to restore. I think most people do. I mean, if you’re interested in buying a fixer upper brownstone, you probably fall in love with those details and you want to restore them. And we just didn’t have the budget to bring in a crew that could do all of that top to bottom. We had to do a lot of the work ourselves, bring in some people to help in select areas. But what we did was we brought in people that we could work alongside them, and that’s how we learned our skills with some of this stuff. You have a lot of the original details that need to be restored, you have party walls or row houses, townhomes that share party walls on both sides.

Party wall being what for people who may not know? Sounds like fun.
Bordelon: It sounds like a good time. A party wall is just if you have a house that touches another house and there isn’t any space between them, so you just have a row of houses all in a row, the wall that separates them is a party wall because both houses have rights to it. That’s a shared wall between both houses. There’s a lot of considerations when you have not a lot of houses in the country have those. You have a stoop in the front, you have a facade on the building. A lot of similarities between brownstones and townhouses. These houses that we work in, they’re all kind of put together the same. They have joists that run across the house and pocket into those party walls. There’s a lot of similarities between them and even though there are similarities between them, they’re very different than a lot of houses in the rest of the country. I mean, there’s very few places in the U.S. that have these types of buildings.
Trying to find resources to learn about them and how to restore these details and what to look out for and the types of prices that we deal with here in New York City and Brooklyn versus the rest of the country, it was all very unique. We really felt like there was a lack of information out there for it, and that’s where our desire to share our learnings came from.
Slocum: There’s something very aspirational about historic homes in New York City. I grew up in Las Vegas, but I remember as a kid watching “Sesame Street” on the background of my TV.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, it was such a cool cul-de-sac.
Slocum: I used to always dream of living on that and then later with “Sex and the City” and seeing the stoop moments and the block parties and everything, and I just always wanted to be part of that community. And they’re not building any more brownstones, so there’s a very small select number of them throughout. The majority of them are in New York, but other areas like D.C. and Philadelphia that have brownstones, but they’re not building any more of them. So it is a smaller niche, but the houses are just beautiful.

I was going to ask, and I guess you answered it, what the most Brooklyn city outside of Brooklyn is, and I would’ve guessed Philly. I actually lived in D.C. for a bit. What else is there?
Slocum: Boston has a lot of brownstones as well too.
Bordelon: Chicago has a lot of row houses.
Slocum: Limestone.
Bordelon: They call them greystones there, what we call limestone here in New York. So a lot of the Northeastern cities, the older cities in the U.S. will have similar types of houses.

Since that first renovation that you blogged and you now have a company where you do renovations. And as you were saying, there are a lot of similarities. There’s a small cohort of these types of buildings, but there are similarities across them. What is the most surprising thing you’ve found? I’m sure you get this question a lot in one of your brownstone renovations and you don’t just do brownstones.
Bordelon: We do a lot of different types of projects. Most of them are brownstones. That’s what we’re known for. We really love our Brooklyn community here. In the book, we were really careful to write it for anyone that’s going through any type of renovation. So when we design and build a kitchen, could be in a brownstone, it could be in any house, same thing with a bathroom when we do moldings and floors and things like that. We do have a chapter about historic homes, which is one of our favorite ones because that’s where a lot of restoration knowledge went, but the majority of the book is for anyone buying a fixer-upper and going through a renovation.
Slocum: There’s been some cool clients. I’m always amazed at the newspapers we find anytime we do demolition and just how relevant the news is of the past and how it’s very much circulating now into modern day. But we found newspaper clippings from 1903, a lot of the early 1900s, and I’m just always amazed at the classified ads on those newspapers. We have found a vintage gun, an old antique gun.
Bordelon: Next to a rocking chair. It was like hidden up in the attic.

Did you keep it and refurbish it and display it or sell it or just get rid of it?
Slocum: The antique gun, we did keep. We’re actually finishing that project and we have it stored aside for the client. We’re going to frame it. The chair, we tried stripping it and it’s just not worth saving. So we brought it to a demolition depot.

So you’ve finished your house, you’ve got this community. When do you start this company, this design and renovation firm?
Bordelon: So we were blogging away. We started our blog, we started our Instagram account. We were sharing all the things we were learning as we were going through our own renovation, we were having some successes, we were figuring things out, we were having some setbacks and we were putting it all out there. Around the time we were wrapping up our renovation, we weren’t quite done with it yet, some people were reaching out to us and asking questions. We were giving resources and referrals and answering restoration questions and sharing what we could. And some people that reached out to us really seemed like they needed more help than just giving them some suggestions and resources. We always joke that the emails we would get, the subjects would be like, “Please help.” People just really needed someone to guide them through the process and walk them through and give them peace of mind and bring in resources when needed and that sort of thing.
And so we eventually worked up the courage to ask someone if they would like us to help them with their project. And we had met them for coffee, fell in love with them and wanted to work with them. They said yes and we had our first client and we very quickly had a second client and then a third client. And then around the third client is where Jordan and I sat down and decided, “Are we going to do this full time? Is anyone ever going to reach out to us again for help?” And that’s when we actually quit our day jobs. Up until this point, we were sort of doing it on the side while we still had our regular jobs. And so we both decided to make the plunge, we quit our day jobs, our full-time jobs and-
Slocum: Gave up our health insurance.
Bordelon: Gave up our health insurance and our steady incomes and things like that. That was now five or six years ago. And I think we counted recently because sometimes we lose count, but I think we just completed our 26th historic home project and we have 8 more that we’re working on right now.

And it’s all owners, it’s all homes. Or do you get renters who are like, “I don’t own the place but I need to fix it up inside?” I’m not asking out of any particular ultimatum, but I’m looking around my cramped and overrun apartment and thinking maybe we could use a little love here.
Slocum: We have definitely done some rental apartments and those are always fun for us. Everybody should be able to make their house a home. And whether you’re renting or buying, we’re very passionate about design overall. So for us, it doesn’t matter if it’s a renter or you purchase your home.

So you started as a blog and now you are the advice givers, but what was the first best piece of advice you got from the community once you were putting out your own challenges?
Bordelon: Asking for help when you need it is really important. And a lot of people go into DIY projects and muddle through it and don’t get the help they need or they’re just afraid to start it because they don’t think they can do it. And if you know can ask for that help anytime you need it, then it might give you a little bit more confidence to even go into the project. And of course you’re going to end up with a better result. And that’s what we found out really soon.
And one of the first projects we did in our house, which was our wood-stripping, we started it. We weren’t doing the right technique, we weren’t using the right chemical and materials and things like that. We didn’t know if we were going to finish. It’s not working. We need someone to help us. And so we had someone come in and help us figure it out and help us learn how to do it. And now we have this really great resource and this person that came in and helped us who we still work with today in a lot of our projects, that we can bring forward into future projects
Slocum: And something I love that I always go back to my mindset of when we purchased our home is and now I tell people that reach out to us is trust your gut. And I say that because we met with a couple of contractors that just suggested we tear everything out and they rebuild and build new because for them it was easier and it didn’t feel right. There were so many beautiful original details that the craftsmanship that went into this labor of love is just mind-blowing to me and I wanted to restore that. And here I had a guy telling me just to rip it out because it was easier for him and I trusted our gut and that’s what led us to really want to have an understanding of the wood restoration.
So if you are out there and you’re maybe meeting with contractors and you’re having a hard time communicating with them upfront, maybe your gut is telling you not to work with this contractor. So just listen to your gut when it comes to renovation. It’s definitely a journey that you’ll be on with whoever you go on this journey with and you want to make sure that you have your right partnership in this journey.

And a lot of those tips are in that book. It starts off with even what to think about when you’re getting started. I would imagine, certainly it would be for me that the hardest part of a renovation project is just getting started. It feels overwhelming, I’ve got multiple rooms, I’ve got multiple challenges and visions that may be competing with each other. What would you say to someone who’s looking around their space and thinking this needs a refresh, but I’m completely overwhelmed by that idea?
Bordelon: That is a big reason why we do what we do and we wrote this book because people get stuck, they don’t know what to do next. Those are the emails that we were getting from people with the please help subject. Because sometimes they bought a house or they wanted to buy a fixer-upper, they even closed on the house in some cases and they were like, “We don’t know what to do.” And a lot of times they’re even reaching out to architects and contractors and they’re not hearing back or they’re not getting good information or everything is too expensive or doesn’t feel right.
And so what we recommend is first of all, gather your resources, get information from where you can, and that’s where we ended up turning to these other blogs, reading other people’s journeys and other people’s stories. Ours is out there, other people put theirs out there. Getting knowledge and feeling empowered about going through this process is what we really want people to do. That’s what we wanted people to take away from the book. It’s just a feeling of empowerment that you have some peace of mind. You’re like, “Oh, I understand this process. I get how it works. I understand where everyone fits into a renovation project. Who are the players? Who do I need to talk to?” You don’t feel like you’re missing something or you don’t have a piece of the puzzle.

And the book does a great job. It’s spread out over 15 different chapters based on different steps of the renovation, and you do get into the nitty-gritty of everything from nooks and crannies to shelves to marble to whatever. For me, I look at this and like, “Look, I have an income. I’ve got kids and I’ve got a life.” And the budgeting of it, yeah, it’s daunting and you address that too, but what do you say to someone who is like, “God, I would love to fix up my place, but what is this going to cost me? And it sounds so expensive.”
Bordelon: That’s what we’re here for. You need someone like us, you need someone to come in and help you develop a budget. It’s tough. In the book we have a budgeting chapter. There’s some techniques that you can use with a price per square foot, so we love getting really specific with those numbers. Any things that we put out there, so a blog posts that we’ve written in the book even we’ve written about what things actually cost, because that’s some of the biggest questions we get from people.

There’s such a lack of transparency and you do a good job of laying that out.
Bordelon: And there’s a really big variance in between what you can get, and it’s even tough when you do get numbers to understand what you’re looking at. So we try to be really transparent and upfront about it because we know that is one of the biggest questions that people have. And so giving information around what they should expect for costs. How do you budget for a total home renovation? How do you budget for just doing a kitchen or just doing a bathroom? What should you be thinking about for architecture and engineering and city filing costs and things like that? We try to get as detailed as we can just to give people as much information as possible.

Has there ever been a project where you’re like, this is not doable, or where do you draw that line? How do you know where that line is when the renovation is not worth it?
Slocum: Anything and everything is doable. It’s just a matter of budget, going back to our conversation. But I always go back to one of our largest project was a parking garage that we convert it into a modern-day carriage house.

It’s gorgeous. The white facade.
Slocum: That project was really interesting because back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, it was a carriage house. And then over the years they’ve done several renovations where when the owners took over, it was a parking garage/junk shop. So we knew that it was almost a brand new build, everything but the party walls were needing work, but the clients had a budget as they should and everyone should. So we had to get very creative on materials and ways that we can work within their budget to achieve the overall goal of them converting this into their forever home.
Bordelon: Sometimes our work starts with actually helping our clients find the right house too. A couple of years in, I ended up getting my real estate license because so much of it was looking at the house and understanding the sales cost of the house, what you’re going to purchase that house for, but also understanding what the renovation budget needs to be to make sure that that’s the right house. Because very easily you could end up buying a house not understanding what the costs are going to be to make it what you want it to be, and then it ends up not being the right house to buy because the renovation costs are too hot. So it’s balancing those two things out. So at least like half our clients at this point, we actually help them find the house. We do that budgeting work with them even before they make an offer, before they go into contract and buy the house.

But then they have to budget for you too?
Bordelon: Absolutely. But the way that we do it is obviously I’m a real estate agent, so the cost that you pay for that is what you would pay for any other real estate agent. So instead of working with a real estate agent who can’t help you with what that renovation is going to cost and what resources we need and that has that knowledge, we have both. So we don’t charge any extra for that other than the real estate commission.

Which of you two in your own projects is most likely to overspend?
Slocum: I like expensive things, I think.
Bordelon: I agree with that.

Where do you go for inspiration? I mean there’s so much sameness out there, there’s so much, especially in contemporary design, everything starts looking the same on Pinterest, on Instagram, how do you find inspiration?
Slocum: Design is so overwhelming, especially with like you said, all the Pinterest pages out there and all the now Instagram, the photos that everyone is just drawn to, especially when they know when you’re starting to search for a house because they will just throw everything your way. An exercise I like doing with our clients that motivates me is I have them create a playlist for me. How do they want to feel when they’re in their space, in their future kitchen, in their future living room? And then I take on their mood by listening to their playlist because I’m very inspired by music. That’s helped me visualize their space and present what I feel that room would entail after listening to their playlist.

Is there anyone, had just terrible taste in music and you couldn’t get into their head space?
Slocum: Not really, no. You would think that there would be a client or two, but no, I understand each of their playlists. The common thread is jazz. There’s a lot of jazz roots in all of these kitchen and living room vibes that is really inspiring.

What do you listen to in your own home? Also jazz?
Bordelon: We listen to a lot of stuff, but I’m from New Orleans originally, so I do have a really big love for jazz. We listen to jazz pretty often. We also like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé and rock.
Slocum: Sundays is always Morrissey. Morrissey Radio is always on Sundays.
Bordelon: Van Morrisson. Oh, we do a lot of Fleetwood Mac Radio on Spotify as well. That’s always a good one.

I mean, all good. No complaints there. Is there a thing that if you were to go into a home that you would most go out of your way to say, whether it’s a detail or whatever it is, what is the thing that you will, I don’t care how tough that’s going to be to save, I’m going to save it.
Bordelon: So it can be different in each house. It depends on the house. So that’s one of the things that we go in, assess that in the very beginning. What are the features that make this house very special? Sometimes it is the woodwork. Sometimes the woodwork is beautiful, even if it’s painted or it has a lot of varnish on it, we know that we can strip it back and make it beautiful again. Sometimes it’s the plaster — plaster crown, plaster medallions in the ceiling. Sometimes it’s the marble fireplaces, could be a combination of all the above. One of the houses that we recently worked on, it’s actually the house that’s on the cover of the book. We call it Dream in Fort Greene.

It’s beautiful. I’m holding it right here. It is a dream.
Slocum: Such a dream. But for us, that project was all about the plaster tapestry at the top, the crown molding and also the medallions. I don’t know if you could see on the cover of that photo or not, but we basically designed the entire house around the intricate plaster medallions.
Bordelon: And it took a lot to save them. We had to lose other things. So for instance, we had to do some things in that ceiling and since we couldn’t demo that ceiling and we didn’t want to even demo part of it because we could lose chunks of it if we went in there too much, we had to lose the floor above so that we could get into that ceiling. But it was a small price. So there’s always give and take with it, but for us, saving that ceiling was the most important thing and we’re very, very happy that we did because it looks beautiful.

It does. And it gave you the cover for your book. Was there ever a ceiling or something like this that you tried to save but couldn’t, like a renovation disaster or nightmare?
Slocum: Yeah, unfortunately it has happened to us. We are moving some walls in the house to create either larger spaces or an additional bedroom, and because of that, we do unfortunately lose the ceiling sometimes that involves that. But our ethos is to always bring it back in, so we’ll look at creative ways that can work within the budget that we can bring in the original or something very close that would’ve been time appropriate to the house.
Bordelon: There’s a house that we did we call The Gates House, and that one, something really similar to that happened. That one was all about the woodwork in that house, and we really painstakingly restored that woodwork and it was gorgeous and we wanted to save the floors as well, and we gave it our best shot. So it had original floors, we sanded them down and they were just really falling apart. Chunks of them were coming out and we just got to the point where we realized that as much as we gave it our best shot, we weren’t going to be able to save them. We put in a new floor, but we put in, like Jordan said, a very period appropriate floor. We put an inlay in, we put a little design in the corner and we put the floor in on a diagonal nice thin board as well, just so it didn’t look too modern.
It ended up looking really beautiful, and I think when you look at the house as a whole with the restored wood, that house also had restored plaster and a new floor, it all fits together very well, and I think a lot of people would think it’s a meticulously preserved original wood floor that the house has.

I just keep going back to the fact that this started with you two dating early in your relationship and now you’re however many years into your relationship, and not only are you working together now and still doing this on an ongoing basis.
Slocum: We spend a lot of time together.

I couldn’t imagine it, and now your company’s grown. You’ve got a team of what? Seven people now. That’s got to be a challenge in and of itself. You could probably start a blog about, hey, I’m growing a business and I don’t know what I’m doing. Talk about those challenges of growing this business that you’ve got to pick the right people, scale is difficult. What’s the number one concern for you guys?
Slocum: Yeah, so Barry and I spend so much time together, like you mentioned, our team has grown into seven people. We have three architect designers on our team. That was our first hire, was hiring a project manager, architect, designer who’s still with us, and she’s incredible. Terry Page, if you’re listening, we love you. But we have developed this full team and Barry and I are with each other 24/7, and every day presents its own challenges. So we’re still figuring it out and it’s kind of going back to our story of why we started and what our end goal is. Barry and I spent so much time just talking about what our end goal really is.

What is the end goal?
Slocum: That’s a great question, Brian. There’s something really special that we love and that is the community of Brooklyn and these beautiful homes that were built. The reasons why people come to Brooklyn, want to spend the millions of dollars that they spend to live here in New York and how we’re a part of that and if there’s any opportunity for us to be part of that is something that is very important for us to be part of that small story.
So we do want to keep our design and build firm just because for us, that is the core of why we’re doing this is that we want to save these houses. We want to give them another life for another 100 years to still be prominent, but we’re trying to figure out all this additional stuff that we’re doing because we have an entire social media business as well too. A lot of campaigns and a lot of marketing things through that is important for us because we feel like that can bring Brooklyn out into the world of if we can get licensing deals into a lighting collection, which we’re working on, maybe someone in Las Vegas will want our lights, which is cool because the ethos of that will be from our Brooklyn based company.

We talk about that at Brooklyn Magazine, that culture is born here and everywhere you go, Brooklyn means something to someone and means something different. This DNA of Brooklyn is a global export at this point. You mentioned social media, you have large platform, you have following on Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest. What’s the best platform for you for what you do?
Slocum: I love our YouTube channel because for us, it’s able to create our own TV show and we go into that community that I just talked about, and for us it’s like a really wonderful way of creating our own content around these projects that take us nine months to a year and a half that we’re really proud of. We spend so much sweat and tears in and it’s not an overnight HGTV show. We do the best that we can do documenting it, and it’s something that we’re really proud of. So I would direct people to our YouTube channel.

You guys actually got engaged on House Beautiful’s My Better Half and the video is out there, it’s very sweet. That was a surprise to Barry?
Bordelon: It was a total surprise. I had absolutely no idea, but it was really cute and the House Beautiful team were all in on it and they were amazing and they all came in the room after. Everyone there was aware of it except for me and the room filled with people after, yeah, it was really, really nice.

Typical day in Brooklyn. You’re not renovating a home, you’re not, I guess stripping a floor or preserving plaster ceilings, what’s a typical day for you?
Slocum: We like taking our dog Zuko to Prospect Park in the morning for off-leash hours.

Love off-leash in Prospect Park.
Bordelon: So fun. I mean, there’s just dogs everywhere. It’s amazing. Sometimes we grab a bagel at Old Brooklyn Bagel, which is Jordan’s favorite on Vanderbilt. Maybe an iced coffee. Jordan only drinks iced coffee, cold brew.
Slocum: Must be a Vegas thing.
Bordelon: We love hanging out on our stoop with our friends and going to dinner and we love trying new restaurants and we’ve got a lot of Broadway shows, which has been really fun. We live in a city that has so many really beautiful cultural things, so experience, so we love to try to do that. We also travel quite a bit, so we try to take some time for ourselves and have a couple of big trips a year that we love planning and organizing and getting ready for. So it’s kind of your normal stuff, I guess.
Slocum: We both realized we share this mutual passion of architecture and historic preservation while we were biking around Brooklyn.

This was your first date?
Slocum: Second date. So we still like to bike around and go different routes and explore.

How did you guys initially meet?
Slocum: Well, we met on a dating app called Grindr. Shout out Grindr. We are getting married this October too, which is kind of a full circle moment. We finally decided to give the plunge and get married and very on brand for us, but we’re getting married on our stoop and we’re going to have a party wedding, so it’s very on brand for us.

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.