A Little Less Suburban, Please

After her marriage, she moved “kicking and screaming” to a ranch house in Bergen County. She never took to the suburbs. Her attitude was: “Well, you don’t need too many trees. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. I missed city living big-time.”

When she divorced two decades later, the cost of living in New York was prohibitive, she said. Besides, she was working in New Jersey.

“I fell into the trap that bigger is better,” Ms. Daukantas said. The place she bought, 15 years ago, was a 1,700-square-foot loft-style triplex condominium in Paterson, N.J. It cost her $150,000. Like goldfish, “we expand to the size of our containers,” she said, so she filled her rooms with furniture and her closets with clothing. Her two cats had the second bathroom to themselves. When the mortgage was paid off, “I had all this disposable income,” she said, “so I put in a new kitchen and a new bathroom.”

Most of the space sat unused. She spent a lot of time up in the loft, with the two cats and the TV.

Ms. Daukantas, 58, who works in human resources technology for a medical device maker, always assumed she would return to the city when she retired. She knew that, as she got older, driving after dark could become a concern. So could three flights of stairs. Already she was aware of the climb. She would go to the effort of lugging litter up the stairs, she told the cats, “and all you’re going to do is pee on it.”

Last year, she and her youngest sister, Laura Corbett, who lives on Long Island, attended a hockey game at the Prudential Center in Newark. As usual, Ms. Daukantas complained about her living situation. The sisters do “a lot of creative complaining,” Ms. Daukantas said. “You can solve problems that way.”

Ms. Corbett suggested she move. It needn’t be to Manhattan, she said, “because you are going to spend a boatload of money for a closet, and nobody should live like that.”

Still, Ms. Daukantas wasn’t sure she could afford to move even to the Jersey side of the Hudson. “I totally believed this was way out of my league,” she said. “I didn’t know where to begin. I like all kinds of different stuff.”

“I am focused when it is ‘keep an eye on the prize,’ ,” she explained. But now she was not necessarily sure of what the “prize” was. She knew only that she needed a cat-friendly place with parking.

Another sister, Lina Angelo, works in Jersey City and showed her around. Ms. Daukantas loved the area’s urban nature, and sought the guidance of Ronnie Billington, an owner/broker of DBB Realty Group in Jersey City, whom she knew through friends.

Their first excursion was devoted to looking around, “like Macy’s presale shopping,” Ms. Daukantas said. She learned that the one-bedrooms were perfectly reasonable, both in price and in size.

After she sold her Paterson place last fall for $315,000, she returned to the hunt in Jersey City. She expected to spend in the mid- to high $400,000s and to keep her monthly outlay below $2,300.

The Bath House, converted from an abandoned 1903 public bath house, was appealing. “I like the idea of converted anything,” Ms. Daukantas said. “I really respect and appreciate vintage, especially because my place was cookie-cutter.” But the partition walling off the loft was topped with a wide ledge. She imagined her cats would “jump on top of this ledge and roll over, splat.”

The Beacon, developed from the Art Deco structures of the old Jersey City Medical Center, was laden with amenities — too many, Ms. Daukantas felt. They included a screening room, a billiards room, a sauna and fitness facilities. She didn’t relish paying for features she would never use. “If I really wanted to get some kind of exercise,” she said, “I would walk in the park.”

She fell for a three-story single-family row house on Fifth Street. It had French doors, a fireplace and a pot rack in the kitchen. A permit for street parking was available for $15 a year.