Soap Scum As Archaeological Expression

Let's be clear: If it weren't for several key factors, we wouldn't have been able to live out the American Dream at Kawama.

One, the housing market had cooled. It wasn't that there was a deal to be had in Astoria but prices weren't as ridiculous as they could have been. Housing prices had stabilized and flattened out, meaning they were barely in the ballpark for us.

The market being what it was, it meant that we didn't have any competing bidders. We couldn't have gotten into a bidding war. We couldn't have paid the listed price. In a hotter market, we wouldn't be in the mix.

The market being what it was, our skimpy down payment and FHA loan sufficed. The realtor said that the seller was nervous about it, but he convinced him that this was what it took these days.

An interesting note about FHA loans: At the beginning of April, political fighting over the government spending bill was threatening to shut down the federal government. I was reading about it on the way to the closing. It wouldn't have affected our loan, since a commitment was already issued and the bank indicated that they weren't going to stop those, just new loans, but it still got me thinking how lucky we were (again).

As soon as we were done with the major painting projects, I set out to work on the bathtub. Jen's impression of the bathtub made it sound like we'd have to completely renovate the bathroom, but I wanted to try to clean it first. So I went to work doing that.

I don't quite understand what people see in those sliding bathtub doors, but both our apartment and Michael's apartment upstairs had them. You get the feeling that somewhere down the line it was seen as some kind of major technological advance to never have to use shower curtains or something. I don't much like them. They make a small bathroom seem that much smaller. They create a tropical micro-climate that makes it hard to clean. Half the time the damn things fall off the track.

Anyway, so I started by scrubbing the tiles. I don't know if what I was scrubbing off was an extra layer of grout or fifteen years of tenant scum, but I got a lot of it off and it ended up looking halfway decent. Decent enough to forestall a major renovation at least.

Sometimes when you clean stuff you get to a point when cleaning turns into a minor repair project. Kind of like that Viagra ad where the supermarket produce aisle morphs into an orchard, except not as wonderful, and with considerably less certainty.

Which is to say, I started scrubbing at the moldy caulking where the sliding doors met the tub and after seeing that pull away, decided to take down those fucking doors altogether.

Now this could go two ways. It could be a really inspired idea, and turn out great, or all the tile could fall off the wall and shatter and the plumbing would explode or something horrible like that.

Actually, it turns out that it's pretty easy to take off those sliding doors. Our frame was bolted to the tile in three places on either side and held to the tub with caulk. So it came out pretty easily. Inspired! I just had to grout in some holes where the bolts were and put up a curtain rod.

I grouted the holes and spaces in the tile on Friday, just before we left to visit my parents. We got in to Phoenix late that night. The next day Jen took a home test and found out she was pregnant.

What If Jeffrey Maier Saw That Fly Ball Coming Out Toward The Right Field Bleachers And Instead Pulled Back, Allowing Tony Tarasco To Make The Catch?

Except for the fact that there are a lot of kinds of houses in Astoria, there only seem to be two types of houses in Astoria. One type has two floors and a basement:

The other type has three floors and a basement:

And then there are some that started out as two floors and a basement and were expanded to include a third floor and maybe even the house next door:

An aside: Every house apparently was built in 1930. If you look at a listing, nine times out of ten they list the year built as 1930. It's as if the entire borough was created in 1930. Cathy, the buyer's representative, told us that there were only a few eras of development in Queens: Nothing was built during the Depression, for obvious reasons, and nothing was built during World War II, for similarly obvious reasons. So I guess that leaves 1930. When in doubt, just say 1930. Now it's possible that there was a lot of construction that took place in 1930. The Astoria Line — i.e., the present-day N/Q train — was opened in 1917, so in some ways it makes sense that major construction would follow, but every single house? I just spent a long detour searching for clues in the nytimes.com archives. First, you have to remember that all of the streets were named something else back then. Here's an example, a Queens map from 1910. The streets were mapped in 1910; we lived on Lathrop Street between Winthrop and Wolcott Avenues. That elevated line ran along Second Avenue, then Debevoise Street. The Beer Garden would have been located west of Debevoise Street on Woolsey Avenue. From there I plugged in the names of the streets and quit looking after awhile because it was taking too long. I think the names of the streets in Queens changed in the very early 1930s, though I'd have to check on that, too.

Back in June, when we were first starting to look at houses, Jen and I saw a three-story house in Astoria that was advertised as a handyman's special. The price was a little outside of the ballpark, or so we thought at the time, but we figured it wouldn't hurt to look, thinking maybe we could perhaps negotiate our way to Jeffrey Maier range, especially if it needed a little work.

The house we looked at was a real fixer upper. Even a piece of shit. It was one of those situations, if memory serves, where one family lived in it for years and never seemed to do anything by way of repairs. The fixtures were ancient. The drop ceiling in the kitchen had fully disengaged a few presidential administrations ago. There was odd Greek graffiti near the staircase on the first floor. The electricity didn't ever seem to be updated. We could go on and on. The sense we got at the time was that fixing up this place would be way above our pay grade. The listing agent guessed that the house needed more than $100,000 worth of work.

By December we decided we wanted to take a second look at the place.

One, it had a perfect setup: The secondary unit was on the third floor — not the basement — and it had a great open layout with lots of light. The primary unit was two floors, which was a lot bigger than anything Jen and I had lived in before.

The idea of the house was perfect for us, and after seeing so many other places, I kept returning to this particular house. We just had to figure out how big a piece of shit it was. I was guessing — hoping against hope, I suppose — that maybe most of the faults with the place were more cosmetic than, say, structural.

As it turned out, the house was still on the market. We contacted the listing agent and asked if we could see it with Michael.

Bad News: The listing agent told us that the house was in contract. Maybe Good News: The listing agent had another house just like it available, only two doors down. It was in much better shape — move-in condition! — though it was listed for $90,000 more, placing it somewhere near the right field upper deck.

We all saw the place on a Thursday evening. It looked like the house two doors down but in a lot better shape — just like the listing agent said. It looked really promising. The only thing was that we couldn't see the top floor apartment — there was a tenant living there — but if we were serious about it, the agent would get in touch with her and get her permission to enter the apartment.

We got back to the agent and told him that we'd like to see the top apartment, too. We scheduled a return visit for noon that Saturday. By 1:30 p.m. we were sitting down at lunch strategizing our starting negotiating point.

After all the places we had seen this house seemed different. For one, it was a place, maybe the first place, we all actually agreed would work. There weren't any lingering questions about physical safety or structural integrity. It was in a neighborhood we all agreed was a "smart investment." There weren't any bizarre quirks like main bathrooms in basements or apartments in basements or anything about the basement other than just a basement. In this case, it featured a relatively nice finished basement. It wasn't like when you applied for a job that you weren't sure you wanted to take or went on a date with someone whom you felt like there was no chemistry with. There was no apparent reason this place wouldn't work. In short, it felt right.

When we travel, I'm the one who has no idea how to haggle. She always tries to get me to play "bad cop" and I always fail her. She'll say something along the lines of, "Oh, this is a nice scarf," and instead of me saying "You don't really need another scarf," I'll say something along the lines of, "Just get it." Because my sense is always that haggling over a few pesos, baht, rupees or dinars is a waste of time. So early on, Jen was determined to keep me far, far away from the negotiating process.

When it came to negotiating a price, I was hesitant to return to the 20 percent game, thinking it absurd. Instead we tried a figure closer to 14 percent. This time Jen called the agent and asked him what he thought about that figure. He counseled us to start out closer to 8.5 percent. Jen asked us what we thought.

Michael had been plugging in numbers and figured that when costs are spread out over thirty years, we could afford to move the fences of our ballpark out some. We decided to follow the agent's advice.

A few minutes later, the agent called us back. We were standing under the elevated train near the Grand Central Parkway. He said that the sellers were countering with 5.5 percent.

"Fuck, dude!" Michael said. Or he said something like that. Maybe I'm penciling in what I was thinking. Suffice it to say, we were happy with this price. After seeing so many places, and seeing enough purchase prices, we were comfortable with the price, and it seemed like a price that indicated that the sellers were serious about selling the house.

Michael thought we should negotiate further. Ten thousand more. Jen and I were hesitant.

"What would it hurt?"

So Jen called the agent back. The sellers countered with five thousand less. We accepted it.

"Fuck, dude, this is totally happening!" Michael said. Or he said something like that. I'm probably penciling in what I was thinking again.

So in December we finally ended our search. We had a house and we would soon be in contract. The agent was going to fax us a binder.

That was the easy part.

In Which We Learn That "Negotiation" Is Something Besides What You Do On A Curvy Road, Or A Tactic To Squeeze Out More Vacation Days

Labor Day came and went, fall intervened, we became busy with the baseball postseason (if you haven't seen this YouTube, it's one of the greatest ever; let it unfold and watch what happens) and before we knew it, we'd done no serious looking for houses. Michael was getting skeptical that it would ever happen. By November, however, we had begun searching online again. A few of the same places were still for sale. Some of the others had been pulled off the market.

Just before Thanksgiving we looked at a two-family house that was in our price range and close to the subway. By this point the sun was setting early in the evening, so we saw it in the dark. The primary unit was OK — my memory of it was that it had a bunch of strange rooms cobbled together and a lot of sewing equipment; it looked kind of like a sweatshop if a sweatshop were run by an older lady from Queens. The secondary unit, on the other hand, was a sight to behold.

If you remember what I wrote about the thrill of spying on people's lives when you are shown a home, and how that thrill quickly dissipates, well for us it was back again. The secondary apartment was on the ground floor, but as the house was built into a hill, it was basically a basement apartment. There were low ceilings, pipes stretching around the walls, "windows" that didn't appear to supply natural light and a makeshift bathroom of some sort that seemed to be held together by clumpy plaster. But the real items of interest were what constituted the tenant's belongings.

As near as we could tell, he was an immigrant vendor of some sort. An inventory of cheap purses was piled in the main room, near a cushion of the type that you might see at a hookah lounge. The contents of the bedroom escape me, but the window treatments seemed to be in a permanent state of drawn. You could see Michael's will start to break.

"I couldn't possibly live in here," Michael whispered as we walked back up the creaky stairs from the lower level. We all got that. He didn't have to say it.

The listing agent, probably sensing that this house wasn't for us, mentioned that he had another house he could show us.

This house was on the same street as the dilapidated Mets house, and would probably be in much better shape. We saw it after Thanksgiving and while none of us were particularly enamored with it, it had all the trappings of a good investment: a garage out back, a location on a nice street and working plumbing. The agent mentioned that there was room to expand, which an investor was considering. It was small, which was the one drawback for us.

"There is another offer," the listing agent told us as we left him. "Just so you know."

We made our offer to the agent. Now, if you go online and look at recommendations for where to begin a negotiation, the common advice is to start 20 percent below listing price and work your way up from there. Twenty percent sounds reasonable if the home is listed for, say, $150,000: $120,000 doesn't sound too ridiculous as a starting number. But at some point, 20 percent might start to sound absurdly low. Maybe not at the upper end, but somewhere between. We were at that absurdly low point.

The listing agent shared our initial offer with the owner, who countered with a number closer to three percent off the listing price. He added that our offer was the lowest offer the owners had ever gotten for the house.

What's more, the listing agent explained, the other offer was in the neighborhood of nine percent off the listing price and that they had 30-40 percent available to put down. Those people were serious enough, he added, to bring a contractor to the house to get a sense of the work that might have to go in to expanding the house.

Further, if we were to raise our offer to match the other one, it would be easy to see where the owner would go: Ten percent for us versus 30-40 percent to the other, it was a no-brainer for the seller. He counseled us to raise our offer to five percent of the listing price.

By this point it was clear to me at least that we were being used as leverage to extract more money from the likely buyer. I had to Google whether this was a legitimate real estate practice, but it was, though I found some interesting discussion about it (here's a more current article about it). And seeing that we were not as crazy about this house, it didn't make sense for us to try to outbid someone else for it. We raised our offer to something still in our ballpark but lower than the other offer supposedly on the table. We never heard anything from them.

I see now online that the house went in contract in February and eventually closed in April for just under three percent off the asking price.

Now this wouldn't all mean much, but the listing agent did happen to mention that his brother had a place that he was selling also in the neighborhood, just a few blocks away. Which just goes to show that it always makes sense to make the effort, just in case one door (literally!) closes and another one (literally!) opens.