Lexa Walsh and Daniel Nelson spent years making a comfortable life in the art community in Oakland, Calif., after meeting at a 2004 New Year’s Eve party hosted by some mutual friends in Berkeley.
“This handsome guy opened the door and said, ‘Hi Lexa. Do you want to have the first kiss at midnight?,’” Ms. Walsh said.
That kiss eventually led to a June 2009 wedding at the Redwood Grove and Amphitheater at the University of California at Berkeley’s Botanical Garden. Over the years, Ms. Walsh worked as an artist and a personal chef, while Mr. Nelson worked in marketing. And they watched uncomfortably as the city became more expensive and less artistic, especially in the years surrounding the pandemic.
“The tech-ification of the Bay Area was sickening and scraped any bit of joy out of it,” said Ms. Walsh, 58. She was particularly put off, she said, by the so-called “orange skies day” in September 2020, when wildfire smoke mixed with fog and turned the northern California sky an apocalyptic hue.
“There are now way too many people for that city,” said Mr. Nelson, 54. “It takes 45 minutes to drive over to San Francisco, as opposed to 10 minutes when I first got there.”
A few likeminded friends had moved to New York’s Hudson Valley, where river towns like Hudson and Beacon were establishing their own art-world bona fides. When the couple visited in 2021, they stayed with friends in Kingston, N.Y. — the same folks who had hosted that fateful 2004 New Year’s Eve party.
They were quickly drawn to Kingston’s art scene, majestic mountain scenery and proximity to New York City. And since both are originally from Pennsylvania, it was closer to their families, with 10 of Ms. Walsh’s 14 older siblings still living on the East Coast. Ms. Walsh has around 50 nieces and nephews and grand-nieces and nephews, whose names are documented in a family database, she said.
So in 2023, the couple packed up and moved into a 1,500-square-foot rental in Kingston, after Mr. Walsh secured a job as the manager of the Woodworking School at the Hudson River Maritime Museum.
“When we moved here I got to see my siblings a lot more,” Ms. Walsh said. “We became better friends and that’s been really amazing.”
A couple of years later, they decided that if they were ever going to buy a home, now was the time.
“Investors are buying up properties and turning them into rentals, and it’s only getting worse,” Mr. Nelson said. “Also,” he added, “we don’t have a bunch of retirement savings, so this is our retirement plan.”
They did have enough to buy something for about $375,000. Since Ms. Walsh’s artist’s income is less stable, they received a mortgage preapproval thanks to the W-2s from Mr. Nelson’s steady job.
Their wishlist included a spacious interior with a big kitchen, ample closets and a guest room. They wanted enough yard for a garden, and for the home to have some architectural character. And they wanted to avoid baseboard heating, which they thought could be inefficient and obtrusive, as well as properties that were in a flood zone.
Mr. Nelson and Ms. Walsh met their real estate broker, Derek Flynn with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Nutshell Realty, through friends from California. They looked at dozens of houses in and around Kingston, many of them turn-of-the-century with similar layouts, and narrowed it down to these three:
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