To be sure, financial considerations also played a key role for Ms. Jacobs, a novelist and dance critic, and her husband, a cultural critic for Vanity Fair. The couple, married for nearly two decades, lived in a Classic 6 in a Rosario Candela building on West 108th Street, and money was a growing concern.

“We had a huge mortgage that never seemed to budge because we kept refinancing,” Ms. Jacobs said. “Plus the maintenance had risen considerably, and there were assessments on top of that. People think writers earn a lot, but we were strapped.”

In October 2011, Vivian Ducat, an agent with Halstead Properties, showed them an estate-condition Classic 7 at the Grinnell, the century-old “Dakota of the North” on upper Riverside Drive in Washington Heights. What Ms. Jacobs described as hideous yellow and orange wallpaper from the ‘60s peeled away from the walls, and huge cracks laced the ceiling. What lay beneath the layers of bright yellow linoleum she had no clue. Leaky pipes had turned the walls spongy, and the bathroom ceiling was so powdery, she used a broom to knock down plaster cascading into the tub.

“We knew it would cost at least $200,000 to renovate,” Ms. Jacobs said. “But then we thought, ‘Oh, to live in a place like this!’ ” They adored the leaded glass, the foyer and the triangular spaces that echoed the building’s footprint. They were enchanted with the mahogany veneer wainscoting and 10-foot ceilings, from which Ms. Jacobs could hang her collection of chandeliers.

In May the couple bought the 2,000-square-foot space for $750,000, closing on their old apartment for $1.36 million the same day. They slept on mattresses on the floor until renovations began in September. At that point they moved to their unheated bungalow near Cape May, N.J., returning only last week, suitcases in hand.

For Ms. Jacobs, the scariest moments involved the discovery of asbestos tile flooring sandwiched between the layers of linoleum. “Asbestos freaks you out,” she said, “because it taps into your O.C.D., and you have an irrational response. Plus it slows things down and adds to the costs.”