Sometimes, we just can’t help ourselves. When we happen to walk by a down-on-its-luck building with a for sale sign out front, our minds begin to wander and we start dreaming about what it could become. When we saw this 1830s townhouse in Brooklyn Heights, however, we didn’t just dream—we pounced. Because we couldn’t actually afford such a building for ourselves, we put together a team to buy it and hatched a plan to renovate and sell it. Then, we completely rebuilt it from the inside out, right down to replacing the floor joists and designing a sweeping new central staircase beneath a skylight. We took off the roof to create a new open-air deck in the former attic, which has views to the East River and Lower Manhattan. We introduced details we had originally conceived for client projects but never used, such as kitchen cabinets with gently curved corners and marble flooring with circular brass inlays. Letting it go at the end of the process was bittersweet, but we know there are many other proud old houses just like it waiting for a similar treatment.