My best friend and I bought a home and raised our kids together for a few years. It was like a sitcom.

• A casual chat with my best friend turned into a serious discussion about buying a house together.
• My friend and I were both single — she had a kid and I was pregnant, so it made financial sense.

Like many aha moments, the idea was sparked by a casual throwaway line.

In 2001, my best friend and I had been on our usual long-distance phone call, chatting about everything from Hollywood gossip to our life goals, as well as a new topic: my pregnancy.

We talked every day, and I was sharing updates about the initial stages. Even though she lived on the other side of the country in New Jersey, she was just as excited as I was for my impending bundle of joy — maybe even more so because of her lifelong love for kids.

During our conversations, one of us said, "We should get a house together." While it was said casually at first, it was an idea that resonated with both of us. We started to bounce it around more seriously and quickly realized it was possible. It started to feel like something we could actually do.

Buying a home allowed us to combine resources

She had a young daughter and was a single mom working long hours as the director of publicity at a record label. I was a soon-to-be single mom freaking out over motherhood, both excited and scared about the prospect of taking care of something with two legs instead of four. We could raise our kids together — pool our resources, time, and money — while navigating homeownership.

Homeownership is perhaps the fastest path to creating generational wealth, and buying a home with a friend cuts your expenses in half, including property taxes and home repairs.

We discussed living in a duplex, which would allow us to have our own space and privacy with a built-in bestie only one flight of stairs away. I thought it could be my forever home, one I could leave for my daughter.

When living with a friend, communication is key

At the time, it had been almost a decade since my bestie and I lived in the same state, but in summer 2001, I sold my condo in California and moved back to my home state of New Jersey. It felt like getting the band back together. They say it takes a village to raise a child, and I decided moving back to Jersey for a home-court advantage before I gave birth would be best.

Buying a house with a friend is a huge investment. To make it work, communication was key. We made a list of must-haves for our new home. We were looking for a duplex with identical interior layouts, an enclosed garage, and a backyard. Additionally, we wanted to be close to Manhattan because of her commute, and plenty of suburbs in New Jersey met that requirement.

The road to the perfect house was long

We spent our weekends going to open houses and saw a lot of properties that had almost everything. However, I was getting nervous; it was fall 2001, and I was due at the beginning of 2002. I wanted us to be settled in our new place before my baby came, without settling.

We finally found the perfect house, in Maplewood, New Jersey, in late fall. It was an upstairs and downstairs two-bedroom duplex. The units even had enclosed porches that we could use as home offices. Maplewood was an idyllic artsy community a few train stops away from Manhattan.

We moved in with less than a month before my due date

Once we closed on the property, we had trouble getting the tenants out of the upper unit, which was my new home. Even though they had been given notice that the property had been sold, they hadn't found another place to live. After they finally left, I moved in with less than a month to spare before I gave birth.

By buying a duplex together, we could give our kids a suburban lifestyle that would have been more challenging to attain if either of us tried to do it on our own. And let's face it, you need your girls when you're going through tough times. Now my BFF lived downstairs. It was great.

Living with my best friend was like an episode of 'Golden Girls'

I remember almost wanting to give up on breastfeeding because my milk wasn't flowing. One time, we convened in my kitchen for a dead-of-night commiseration that only a best friend would be willing to participate in.

Now, instead of a disembodied voice on a long-distance phone call, we were face-to-face at my kitchen table. She encouraged me to keep trying, and before the sun came up that morning, my baby was latching on, and she continued to breastfeed for the next 18 months.

Those first few years together were like a sitcom — kind of like "Golden Girls" with kids. I think my daughter's first or second word was "downstairs."

Having the safety net of a friend made parenthood easier

The minute she learned to walk, she wanted to scoot her way down the steps to get in the mix with whatever was going on. There were always sleepovers downstairs. It would be a houseful of kids with my bestie's daughter and her friends, and of course, my little one wanted to be with the "big" girls. On Sundays, we would alternate between units to have dinner together.

We had our Lucy and Ethel moments when trying to battle a family of squirrels that resided in our walls or digging our cars out of waist-high snow in the winter. I left to move back to Los Angeles in 2005 —because of said waist-high snow — and we eventually sold the house.

Those were probably the best first few years I could've asked for as a new mother. Being able to share the hopes and fears of being a new mom and having the safety net of a friend within arm's reach was priceless.