Keep In Mind That The Yearly Interest On $105,000 Of Credit Card Debt At An APR Of 12% Is $12,600, Or $1050 A Month, Which, If I’m Not Mistaken, Would Get You A Sweet Rental In Many New York City Neighborhoods

Brooklyn man discovers the joys of home ownership:

Even if $260,000 was a steal by New York City standards in 2004, David Petersen found the 1,100-square-foot row house, on 18th Street near Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, stiflingly narrow at 13 feet 7 inches wide, with dim light and low ceilings. “The ceiling fan would have sliced off your head,” he recalled, and the walls and floors sloped at odd angles. The home inspector’s report jumped with exclamation points: “Bowed floors!” “Lead pipe to water supply!” “Roof in bad shape!” “Walls not plumb!”

But for an independent filmmaker with no full-time job and not much in the way of savings — living, as Mr. Petersen says artists do, “in a quaking state of fear” — home ownership was an irresistible lure.

Renovations were in order, and the man put $75,000 towards them, basically the cost of a modest bathroom:

“I started with really low expectations,” Mr. Petersen said. “I wanted level floors and a dry basement.” But soon after construction began, he received a call from his next-door neighbor Vinny DeMarinis, a retired fireman who had grown up in Mr. Petersen’s new house. “How much insurance have you got?” Mr. DeMarinis asked. “I got a hole in my wall the size of a Buick.”

And, Mr. Petersen said, “therein began my sadness.”

. . .

It turned out that the walls between the houses there were only five inches thick; banging on a wall in Mr. Petersen’s house sent tremors down the street, and especially into Mr. DeMarinis’s home. “Any work done in any house,” Mr. DeMarinis said, “it’s really a block activity.” Each time he spoke with Mr. Petersen, he would greet him, “Dave, I’m sorry I ever met you.”

There were more surprises. The foundation wasn’t bad; it was nonexistent. The previous owner, Mr. DeMarinis’s brother-in-law, had carved his own basement by digging below the house and carting out five-gallon buckets of dirt. The house was structurally unsalvageable.

With renovation costs almost tripling the cost of the house, the man resorted to creative, Enron-esque financing:

Having siphoned off some of his loan money to pay for a print of his film “Let the Church Say Amen,” about a Washington storefront church, which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004, Mr. Petersen was approaching pennilessness, with the house nowhere near completion. He applied for a $75,000 line of credit through his film company, Beaufort 9 Films. He begged money from relatives, convincing his mother to mortgage her modest Takoma Park, Md., condo and nearly causing a familial rift. “I became like an addict,” he said. “I tried to get money from everywhere.” As renovation costs climbed to $390,000, he resorted to old-fashioned indie filmmaking methods: he used his credit cards.

But ultimately the man survived, whittling down his monthly payments to the cost of one or more used cars:

In the end, it was hardly a disaster. The bank reappraised the house at $1.25 million, allowing Mr. Petersen to take out one last loan, wipe out his $105,000 of credit card debt and lower his monthly payments to the $3,000 range (he has had to work a couple of full-time freelance jobs, as a television editor, to make them). “Suddenly I have this thing called equity,” he said. “I have worth in the eyes of the bank” — and, in theory, a little more leverage when it comes to paying for his next film.

And the man lived happily ever after . . .