Last summer we put our apartment on the market. With a baby on the way a one bedroom apartment, no matter how much we loved it, no longer seemed feasible. And while many of our neighbors begged to differ – “you could just put up a wall in the living room!”—we decided we wanted more. Sure, we agreed with our neighbors, nodded along with them as they described how to carve a tiny nursery out of a large living room, even stepped inside their own apartments as they showed us exactly how they finagled some extra space for baby. But behind closed doors we dared to dream of a yard, a barbecue, a driveway—all the trappings of home ownership that we felt we had earned and that we wanted our future family to experience.
We found that house last fall. It was perfect in every way that mattered to us. We set a close date for December and hoped to sell our apartment around the same time. Late November we got word that our potential buyer’s application had been rejected by our co-op board. If you don’t live in New York City, you may not know about co-op apartments. Count your blessings. In a nutshell, when you own a co-op apartment, you don’t own the actual property that you live in; rather, you own shares in the building. And so, anyone who seeks to move into one of these buildings must be approved by the co-op ‘board’—essentially a group of stick in the muds who have nothing better to do than fret about who left the pizza boxes in the garbage room, throw you the stank eye if you are three minutes late pulling your clothes out of the basement washing machine, and declare that the building is going to shit what with all the subletters coming and going. But I digress.
As I said, the house was perfect. So we proceeded with the close while we started anew in our search for an apartment buyer. Did I mention I was nine months pregnant at the time? No? Small detail. The baby came in January, we moved into our new house, and all the while the apartment sat empty and unsold. We got a new realtor. We paid two mortgages. I quit my job and we went down to one income. We continued to pay two mortgages. The imaginary noose around our necks grew tighter and tighter. Eventually we got an offer. Accepting it was easy; fretting over whether this new buyer would pass the board was not. A co-op board can deny a prospective resident for any reason they wish. Google search unearths a Girls Gone Wild video you starred in in college? You’re out (or maybe, IN, in certain buildings?).
While we’ve had an accepted offer on our apartment for a few months, it wasn’t until a couple weeks ago that we were able to breathe a big sigh of relief. The buyer was approved! I think we were probably more ecstatic than she was. Yesterday Mike closed on the apartment. He handed the keys over to the buyer, but he said it wasn’t easy.
“She asked me what was wrong,” he told me as we talked last night. “I told her that we had had so many experiences in that apartment: we got engaged while we were living there; we got married, we conceived and had our baby…”
“That’s right,” I said, and thought about how that little apartment had been our home base for so many life milestones in the span of just four years.
He spied an engagement ring sparkling on the buyer’s finger. “I told her I hoped she had the same experiences.” I hope so too.
Tags: home, New York City life
