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I have been reluctant to post this question, but here it goes. My partner of 8 years and I currently live in the West 60s in Manhattan. I have had a thing for Park Slope brownstones since I first visited the area as a teenager in the ’80s, and over the last year or so we have increasingly considered moving into one.

The pros of our current situation are that we have owned our apartment for about 7 years and generally like it a lot. It’s a fully renovated pre-war on a high floor with unobstructed views of Central Park. We can both walk to our jobs in midtown and have many nearby amenities (restaurants, Fairway, Whole Foods, movie theaters, etc.). The cons are that our apartment is only a one-bedroom (a guest bedroom and dining room would be great), it’s costly (maintenance fees, etc. of $2k/month), we’ll never be able to afford a two-bedroom version of our apartment (five-room, park-view condos are double the price of the brownstones we’ve looked at; co-ops are not as bad, but the board requirements are prohibitive) and our neighborhood is becoming less and less of a neighborhood (new high-rises and big box stores all over the place — we mainly live here because of the convenience factor and our view).

The pros of Park Slope are that it has a real neighborhood feel, it’s downright beautiful and the people seem great. Also, we can probably afford a pretty decent brownstone. The cons are the commute to work (30-40 minutes on the subway, based on our test runs), losing the conveniences of a full-service building (doorman to accept deliveries, etc.) and, well, it’s just the two of us and we don’t have kids to fill up a house, so there’s the guilt factor — a whole house for just two people seems decadent. However, I don’t think we would move to Park Slope to live in an apartment — the idea of owning a brownstone is really the draw.

We’ve thought about more “neighborhoody” areas of Manhattan that we like, such as the Village and West Village, but the houses there will forever be out of our price range, we don’t want to live in a loft or a modern glass building, and the pre-war, non-loft apartment stock downtown isn’t that great (mostly one-bedrooms and so-so combinations). Here’s one more fact for the mix — we have a small weekend house about two hours out of the city, we spend at least half of our weekends there and we intend to keep it. So, should we give Park Slope a try, or should we just stay put? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Truly sorry if all this just sounds annoying.