The housing saga continues

Our New York housing saga continues, but I’m pleased to report that after multiple trials and tribulations, the pawns have become the players.

A couple of weeks ago, we bumped into the people in the flat below us who were trying squeeze a king-sized mattress down the very narrow set of stairs in our 1920s brownstone building. “It’s a nightmare, really,” said the woman, whose cats (Rice and Beans) I had once looked after while they were on holiday. “We were hoping to be here for years.”

“Us too!” I said, though it wasn’t strictly true that we were planning to renew the lease on an apartment where you can only watch TV if certain lights are on and you’re sitting over the right floorboard.

The woman and her husband departed for pastures new that weekend, and we are now left living in a shell of a building with empty apartments all around us. Our flatmate moved in with his girlfriend yesterday, taking almost all of his furniture with him, except the stuff that his girlfriend has decided doesn’t fit well in the new home they’re building. Hence we now have a large yellow armchair, no TV, no cutlery, one mug between us, a blow-up mattress and a bookcase which for some reason only houses a pile of quarters and a motorcycle helmet. The cat our flatmate left behind picks his way through this strange compilation of miscellaneous objects, meowing at everything he sees in utter confusion. I know how he feels. The flatmate also took the bin, of course, so filled trash bags are interspersed with our moving boxes throughout. It’s fair to say that at this point in time, my fiance and I have a living situation that you might not be surprised to see on Ultimate Hoarders or in a Google image search for “people who have lost control of their lives”.

And yet, and yet. There is hope on the horizon.

After the initial chaos of apartment viewings and real estate agent schmoozings, we came up with a system. Each day, we scour all relevant websites (divided equally between us) for new flats coming up in our area. I write an email and a text. My fiance then calls and arranges a viewing. We pre-prepare every document imaginable, we give ourselves less than five minutes inside a property (“bicycle” Is our codeword for if we really like it, as in “So where do you think I would fit my bicycle?”) and we email over the documents as soon as we shut the door.

With this method, we have found success. We have now been approved by three separate landlords for three separate apartments, all of which are of different sizes and situated in different areas (the most spacious has room for a sofa and a bed, whereas the least spacious is on a gorgeous tree-lined street in Brooklyn and has room for our bed, a hot-plate and a small rug.) Since approval, we have been waiting to see if we get the final thumbs-up by any of the management companies who stand between us and the final lease-signings. We have had to convince ourselves that we love each apartment equally.

“That one with the hour-long commute and the flickering halogen lights in the basement isn’t my favourite,” one of us will admit over dinner one night; or, “If I’m honest, I would be bummed out to live somewhere with a previous bedbug infestation.” The other will then passionately jump to the defense of the apartment under attack: “But the area! The nightlife! The Mexican-French fusion restaurant right on the corner! The hot yoga studio just down the road!” or, “But who cares about bedbugs when there’s a roof terrace to relax on in the summer? We can just take our bed up there!” We play the game every dinner time, and go to bed convincing each other that every apartment has equal merit. I can’t even fully admit to myself that one of them is vastly superior, lest it be taken from us by the fates and the furies.

We’re due to hear back on which will become our home for 2020 at the end of the week; unless, of course, we are once again out-maneuvered by the estate agents of New York City who continue to work in deeply mysterious ways. If we’ve played this right, however, the shoe will be on the other foot and we’ll be the ones able to say, come Friday, “I’m sorry but we’re not going with you after all. We’ve found someone else.”

The best revenge is a life well lived, as they say, but I’d settle for the revenge of sending a turn-down text to a realtor and a life lived in a passable apartment in Brooklyn. If it all works out, I might even push the boat out and invest in some forks.