When Life Gives You Lemons, Dream About Building A Roof Deck

After transferring boxes to their respective room, we spent the first days at Kawama painting. It's good to paint for a lot of reasons, not least of which being the pure aesthetic goal of making your walls look nice, but I think it's also helpful to be able to look at every square foot of wall up close to see the history of the structure. With any luck, you'll notice nothing out of the ordinary, but if anything's there, early on is a good time to notice it.

Here's something cool none of us realized about getting a mortgage: Because mortgage interest is paid in arrears, you don't pay what you owe until the end of the month. And since the prorated first month's interest is figured into the closing costs, you basically have over a month until you start having to pay the mortgage. Se we used our security deposit from our apartment as the last month's rent there, we had three months to replenish the coffers. A very small benefit of buying a house.

We also spent the rest of the month of April waiting for the tenant to move out.

To be honest, at first it wasn't that strange to be living with a tenant. It just sort of felt like we were renting an apartment somewhere. And since she was out of town for the first week or so, it didn't feel like we were living with anyone at all.

After the tenant came back, however, it was different. I'd hear the tenant turn on the shower, and the oil furnace would come on, and the sound of the oil furnace is less like a furnace than a jet engine, and every time it comes on the only thing you think about is how expensive oil is.

Oil heat is bizarre enough but using oil for your domestic hot water will drive you crazy. One of the worst things about it is that the stupid tank in the furnace seems like it's only large enough for an RV; the water would take forever to get warm and run out faster than I feel like it should.

And knowing there was a tenant up there who didn't have to pay for the oil was crazy-making. I don't think I could ever be a landlord. I would hate it.

By the second or third week of April we had no idea when the tenant was planning on moving out. This became quite a concern for Michael, who absolutely needed to move out by April 30. If the tenant didn't move out by then, Michael would have to move his stuff into the basement and sleep in our unit, which he didn't want to do, and which he wasn't going to do.

Both Jen and Michael texted the tenant to make sure she let us know when she was moving out. She said she was working on it but that she might be delayed a few weeks.

Michael was very unhappy about the whole thing. We were unhappy about the whole thing. At some point I was just thinking, "Lady, get the fuck out of our house." Because this was now our house. And why would someone want to live in someone else's house?

Because the seller never gave the tenant a month's written notice, we would have to give her written notice by May 1. That didn't mean that we expected her to leave at the end of May, just that we had to protect ourselves in the event that the tenant didn't move out, in order to start an eviction process. The agreement we worked out with the seller was that they would be penalized for every day the tenant was here beyond April 30: $250 a day. Part of me sort of wanted to squeeze the seller for some money — not the entire $15,000 but maybe just enough to build, say, a roof deck. Obviously Michael did not feel the same.

As the month of April wound down, we didn't hear anything about when or whether the tenant would move out. We had to go up into the unit a few times to fix some stuff and it certainly didn't look like the tenant was anywhere near being ready to move out. It was harrowing in the same way we were harrowed when we didn't know whether we'd be able to close on the house in the week before we were supposed to close on the house. Michael was stressed. We were stressed for him. We were wondering if we'd have to evict her. It wasn't good.

The final weekend of April was fast approaching. Michael made arrangements with the movers. Michael told the tenant that he was expecting to show up at the apartment at 1 p.m. on April 30. And yet we still didn't really know when she was leaving.

Then things started happening. The tenant was up half the night the day before she was supposed to move; it sounded like things were being moved around. Early in the morning on the 30th, vans arrived. Things exited the apartment. It seemed the apartment was being vacated.

At noon, the doorbell rang. It was the realtor. I was surprised to see the realtor. The realtor explained that he was there to make sure the tenant's move went OK. I didn't realize he could be roped in to having to do that, too. He said we should take a look at the upstairs apartment.

"You can hand this to her," he said, handing me a check. I didn't fully comprehend what the check was for. My first thought was that it was some sort of deposit but then I saw that there were several zeros.

The tenant handed me her keys. We looked around the apartment. It looked fine. I asked her where she was moving. She said that she was moving to Manhattan but couldn't move in for two weeks. She apologized for any strangeness that ensued from her continuing to be in the apartment after we closed on the house. I said I understood, that it was a weird situation. She said good luck and she left in a small U-Haul van.

It seemed that half of the apartment's contents were piled against the retaining wall in front of the house, filled in black plastic bags or just left out on the sidewalk there. It was as if they threw out most of it instead of packing it, as if they made a quick escape. I asked the realtor what happened.

"Look, let me tell you something," George began. Everyone has one verbal tick, and "Look" followed by some revelation of some sort was his. It could have been "Look guys, here's the thing" or "Look, let me level with you" — whatever it was, he liked to say it. So right now it was, "Look guys, I can tell my wife about a situation and she'll tell me what to do, you can tell Jen about a situation and she'll tell you what to do and she" — talking about the tenant now — "will tell her friends about a situation and they'll have all sorts of ideas about what she should do."

Which is to say, if you find yourself in a position where a landlord is trying to fuck you, they're probably doing something wrong. Especially in an urban environment like New York City, which has all kinds of protections for tenants. George thought that the tenant's friends probably encouraged her to dig in and not just accept the seller's short notice. And it paid off for her.

Rather than have to pay us $250 a day while the tenant dithered about deciding when to leave, the seller paid the tenant $4000 to leave by April 30. As the realtor said he explained to her, she either left by April 30 and got $4000 or left May 1 and got nothing. Which was why half the apartment lay strewn about on the sidewalk in front of the house. I dug through some of it and made sure we wouldn't get a ticket for not recycling this or that, and threw the bags in the planter until we could legally put them out on the sidewalk. I found a "I [Heart] NY" refrigerator magnet in one of the bags; I kept the magnet; it seemed funny.

Michael moved in later that afternoon. Everything worked out in the end. He was relieved to finally move but he was (and still is!) a little miffed about the rest of the story.

"You just don't do that," he insisted. The whole process focused his sense of righteous outrage. I don't blame him — just like I don't necessarily blame the tenant for doing what she did. Or the seller, for that matter; no one knew what would happen until it happened. And then it happened. And of course Michael got fucked, because, as the younger sibling, he always gets the short end of the stick. Which in a way is funny, and in a way is not so funny.

But now the three of us were all finally living at Kawama, and the era of Kawama finally began in earnest.

Posted: December 23rd, 2011 | Author: Scott | Filed under: The Cult Of Domesticity | Tags: Eventually Every Archaic Verb Becomes Its Own Cliche, Just Because Mortgage Interest Is Paid In Arrears Doesn't Mean You're Getting Away With One, Kawama, My Oil Furnace Caused 9/11, What Milton Glaser Hath Wrought, You Too Can Learn To Take Full Advantage Of New York City Landlord-Tenant Laws

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