Photo by Kyle Kurlick
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The living room of the Jerkins home features an eclectic combination of modern and vintage styles.
Photo by Kyle Kurlick
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The Jerkins home in East Memphis is 2 175 square feet with three bedrooms and two bathrooms.
Photo by Kyle Kurlick
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The guest bathroom displays a piece of art depicting the Jerkins.
Photo by Kyle Kurlick
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The kitchen features a cozy breakfast table in the corner. The Jerkins created more counter and cabinet space to the right of the stove after moving the washing machine and dryer to a different part of the house.
Photo by Kyle Kurlick
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The dining room features a picture window that offers a view of the backyard.
In baby Juliette?s bedroom, a ?family tree? photo display hangs over an old painted dresser that doubles as a changing table.
Leslie and Jonathan Jerkins are East Memphians, through and through.
They were raised in the same neighborhood, grew up in the same church. They loved their cozy circle of friends and family, so when the time came to create a home for their own family, there was no question where it was going to be.
?We had a very specific geography,? said Leslie, who works as marketing director for Loeb Properties. ?It was Highland on the west, Princeton on the north, Walnut Grove on the south and Mendenhall on the east.?
Basically, the couple didn?t want to stray too far from home.
?When he was her age,? Leslie said, pointing to the couple?s 8-week-old daughter, Juliette, ?Jonathan lived 11 houses down on the same street. Our next-door neighbor was his neighbor as a kid. And I grew up six streets away.?
After they were married, the Jerkinses spent several years in Jonathan?s East Memphis condominium. They looked at houses online for years before finally deciding to put the condo on the market and start a full-fledged search. For that, they called in Realtor Trey Hogue of Crye-Leike?s Cordova office.
?He sold Jonathan the condo,? Leslie said. ?Then he sold our condo and we used him for this house.?
The Jerkinses didn?t start a serious search, in fact, until Hogue had secured a contract on the condo. Once that happened, they had only 30 days to find a house.
?We probably looked for two weeks,? Leslie said.
For the sake of being thorough, the Jerkinses did venture outside their boundaries during the search, checking out a few houses in Cooper-Young.
?But we couldn?t get what we wanted square footage-wise in our price range,? said Jonathan, who?s in his second year of medical school.
?We?d been in the condo so long, and we knew we wanted to have children soon,? Leslie added. ?We didn?t want to go somewhere where a second child would come and we?d have to leave.?
It turned out the Jerkinses didn?t have to look beyond their first-choice neighborhood. In fact, they didn?t have to compromise on their wish list at all. Two weeks into their search, they came across a three-bedroom, two-bath, 2,160-square-foot home in the Hilldale Gardens subdivision that had everything they wanted in a house.
?This was by far the best thing we saw,? Leslie said.
The Jerkinses bought the house in May 2010 for $215,000. Since then, they?ve been working to make it their own.
?The main thing we had to do to the house was the laundry,? Leslie said.
Originally, the home?s washer and dryer were in the kitchen, as they are in many of the 1950s- and 1960s-built homes in the area.
?They were these really huge front-loaders,? Jonathan said. ?They were really nice, but they were in the middle of the kitchen, which isn?t huge anyway. It was probably the reason the house hadn?t sold yet.?
To create a separate laundry room, the Jerkinses hired a contractor to move the doorway of a former storage closet, close it off and run water to the space by digging a new line under the home?s driveway.
?That was the only major project we had to do,? Leslie said, adding that they were able to do it using a $6,500 federal homebuyer tax credit.
Aside from the laundry room addition, the couple has painted nearly every room of the house. They had a pantry cabinet built in the kitchen?s former laundry area and are now in the process of landscaping the front yard. For the most part, though, they loved the house exactly as they found it.
?I think the first thing that stood out to us was the dining room window,? Jonathan said. ?It had a lot of character. And the backyard?s great.?
Leslie also loved the fact that the home has two entertainment areas, a formal living room and a den that was added on ?two owners ago,? she said.
The home?s entry hall is painted the same red as the entry in Leslie?s parents? house and sister?s house, both nearby. To the left of it, the formal living area contains an antique sideboard and two wingback chairs that belonged to Jonathan?s grandparents. A small shelf unit he built with a friend houses his record collection, and one of the couple?s two vintage console-style record players provides a spot to play them.
?We use it a lot,? Leslie said.
In the adjoining dining room, the oval dining table and six chairs were a Craigslist score. The second console-style record player is in this room, as is the large picture window with views of the backyard that initially attracted the couple to the house.
In the den, soft green walls provide a backdrop for a large, traditional rug, red leather chair and ottoman, large wood coffee table and an upholstered chair Leslie found at Sheffield Antiques Mall in Collierville. Built-in bookshelves flank the fully bricked fireplace, which houses an old-fashioned wood-burning stove.
The kitchen had been updated by the previous owners with new cabinetry and new granite and granite-tile countertops. The Jerkinses added a lampshade pendant-style fixture above the round breakfast table and painted the walls a rich blue-green.
Down the hall, the master suite contains a mix of furniture, including a bed given to the couple by Jonathan?s parents and two contemporary nightstands Leslie fashioned out of small, unfinished chests from Ikea. The chests are topped by apple-green lamps she found at an estate sale.
The master bath has a door into Juliette?s nursery, which features soft blue walls and an eclectic mix of vintage furnishings and contemporary accessories. A dresser painted a faint powder pink serves as a changing table and is topped by an arrangement of photos the couple calls the ?family tree wall.?
On the opposite wall, an arrangement of wall art includes a framed collage of Juliette?s name Leslie created using vintage Scrabble squares. A guitar hangs above an upholstered chair where Jonathan sits to play it for his daughter.
The third bedroom serves as a guest room, and down the hall from it, a full bath that was renovated by the previous owners features white subway tile walls accented by a band of square glass tiles in soft grays and aqua.
The Jerkinses? love of their houses is surpassed only by their love of the neighborhood. Both sets of parents live within 5 minutes of their new home, and the neighbors couldn?t be friendlier.
?Three of our neighbors brought us dinner when Juliette was born,? Leslie said. ?They?re outside all the time, and there are a bunch of kids.?
Added Jonathan: ?We love it here.?
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