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.

At Some Point We Didn't Think It Would Happen, And Then It Did

So here we were, late into March, just days away from supposedly closing on the house, and major details were still being ironed out.

That's not to say that we weren't close. The mortgage was ready to go: We had our paperwork in order, the termites were taken care of (or at least we got a treatment for termite damage that may or may not have been from 30 years ago) and somehow the bank had decided that we deserved a huge loan. Our file was cleared by underwriting and was getting a final review from "Quality Control."

The details of the real estate transaction itself were mostly ironed out: The Florida judicial branch approved of the sale, both buyer and seller agreed on the various concessions and although there was some "big issue" with the title, that part was apparently straightened out. In short, it seemed that we were inching toward a positive outcome. There was one lingering issue, however: There was a tenant still living in the apartment upstairs.

It's not necessarily unusual to have tenants living in a house one is trying to buy, but as the house was to be delivered vacant, it was problematic. Not to mention that Michael had already told his management company that he was planning to move out by the beginning of April.

Now you might ask, as we did, How did this happen? The problem came about because the seller waited to give the tenant notice until the Florida court approved of the deal. And since the court took so long to do so, it meant that the seller took a long time to tell the tenant. In the end, he gave her less than two weeks to move out.

So then you start to feel bad for the tenant — it's not terribly fair to tell someone that they have two weeks to move out of an apartment they've lived in for five years. Clearly the seller was trying to have it both ways with trying to squeeze as much money out of the house as possible. The tenant seemed sympathetic to the strangeness of the situation, and she even met with the realtor to see if she could find another apartment. The realtor, wanting to see the deal go through, even offered to waive any fees to get her into another apartment. (An aside: Obviously realtors get a lot of money in commissions, but sometimes they have to put in an awful lot of legwork to see a deal through.)

At the same time, it's sort of like, What did you expect? Not only was there was a for sale sign out in front of the house for over four months but that "In Contract" shingle-dingle had also been dangling there for at least a month or more. You can't possibly come home each night and not think that you'd have to move out sometime soon.

Then again, landlord-tenant law in New York City stipulates that a tenant has to be notified in writing at least a month in advance that he or she must vacate. The seller didn't do anything in writing, and only let her know a few weeks in advance. So she was well within her rights to stay put.

We were just like, Dude, what the fuck?

I mean, on the one hand, the seller was just a person in Florida who was trying to unload a house that his uncle left him; conceivably, he had no clue how landlord-tenant laws worked in New York. On the other hand, shouldn't the attorney have advised him about what to do?

The key sticking point was that the seller and the seller's attorney couldn't give us any indication that the tenant would be out of the apartment in any particular time frame. We were all beside ourselves trying to take in what it meant, including our attorney. He wouldn't let us go through with the sale if we couldn't work out this tenant situation. He was adamant that we shouldn't get ourselves in a situation where we'd be forced to evict someone. Meanwhile, since the process was dragging on so long, our mortgage was in danger of unwinding itself; certain parts of our paperwork and the rate lock we set were close to expiring (at this point in time the rates were inching upward from record lows, something that reversed itself later in the year).

So as late as a week before we finally closed, the three of us were coming to terms with the possibility that not only would we not have a house but we also might be looking for a new apartment to rent. Our landlord was hounding us wanting to know when we were leaving, and all I could tell her was that we'd know something soon.

Michael was of course in the same predicament, although his management company was less understanding; when he told them that he would have to stay another month they threatened the forfeiture of his security deposit. And he, sensitive guy he is, felt bad that the tenant was getting jerked around. This was too much for our attorney: "But who looks out for Michael?" he demanded to know. He took up Goober's cause.

Eventually the attorneys worked out an agreement: Basically, they agreed that the seller would be liable for the tenant as long as she remained in the apartment after closing and set a date for her to leave, with the seller being penalized $250 a day for each day the tenant was there past that date. We'd hold back $15,000 in escrow for these penalties, which wouldn't be released until the tenant left.

And then, suddenly, miraculously, somehow, someway, our closing was scheduled. We were ready to get the house.