Showing posts with label real estate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label real estate. Show all posts
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Monday, March 08, 2010
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Transported!
I am in my new digs - but without internet for now. It may be a week or more before I am connected again from home - slightly insanity-inducing, but I thought I had better explain in case any of my usual correspondents are alarmed by the lack of a near-instantaneous reply to e-mail!
The movers were bad but cheap. They were full of interesting tales!
The driver was from Surinam and had recently relocated back to New York after thirteen years in Atlanta, where he worked as a dental technician and pioneered the use of dental bling on the hip-hop scene - gold, diamonds - there was a lot of money in it back in the day, but now that everyone has been doing that stuff for a while, the bottom has dropped out of the business, so he is picking up extra work as a van driver.
The boss was a manic and voluble Russian who spent much of the day on the telephone to various irate customers as my job stretched out ever longer and he failed to show up to successive appointments (they were at my place almost an hour late to begin with, and I concluded that there was a certain amount of optimism in play with regard to scheduling - he was planning on working until 2:30am, he moonlights as a bartender/party service provider, or perhaps the moving is the moonlight bit).
About six hours later, as we waited for the van so that I could double-check that there was nothing actually precious to me among the stuff that they (very kindly - they were only bad on the count of efficiency, partly because of the bottleneck created by the small freight elevator in my old building, but all four movers were really wonderfully good-natured and obliging) were going to take for me to the Salvation Army, he began one last wonderful verbal riff about how, before he branched out into the moving business, he used to work the most lavish parties.
"Craziness, baby! You can't believe those parties! We had lions! Tigers! Bear cubs!"
(Increasingly skeptical looks from me & crew members.)
"Penguins!"
(Mirth ensues.)
"No, really! It was Miami - Puff Daddy had a party, they got sixteen, eighteen penguins in there - it was hot, the penguins were passing out all over the place" (this bit accompanied by suitable flapping gestures) "and the papers got hold of it the next day, they wouldn't let it drop..."
I was especially tickled because there is a penguin-related adventure in my future, only it involves something so implausibly and extremely exciting to me, I still slightly believe it is not really happening - I will perhaps wait a bit longer for it to sink in, & for private gloating & contemplation, before I share the news...
Blogging will be sporadic over the next week or so, unless somebody has special pull with CUIT and can get me an Ethernet connection in my apartment with apparatchik-like celerity!
The movers were bad but cheap. They were full of interesting tales!
The driver was from Surinam and had recently relocated back to New York after thirteen years in Atlanta, where he worked as a dental technician and pioneered the use of dental bling on the hip-hop scene - gold, diamonds - there was a lot of money in it back in the day, but now that everyone has been doing that stuff for a while, the bottom has dropped out of the business, so he is picking up extra work as a van driver.
The boss was a manic and voluble Russian who spent much of the day on the telephone to various irate customers as my job stretched out ever longer and he failed to show up to successive appointments (they were at my place almost an hour late to begin with, and I concluded that there was a certain amount of optimism in play with regard to scheduling - he was planning on working until 2:30am, he moonlights as a bartender/party service provider, or perhaps the moving is the moonlight bit).
About six hours later, as we waited for the van so that I could double-check that there was nothing actually precious to me among the stuff that they (very kindly - they were only bad on the count of efficiency, partly because of the bottleneck created by the small freight elevator in my old building, but all four movers were really wonderfully good-natured and obliging) were going to take for me to the Salvation Army, he began one last wonderful verbal riff about how, before he branched out into the moving business, he used to work the most lavish parties.
"Craziness, baby! You can't believe those parties! We had lions! Tigers! Bear cubs!"
(Increasingly skeptical looks from me & crew members.)
"Penguins!"
(Mirth ensues.)
"No, really! It was Miami - Puff Daddy had a party, they got sixteen, eighteen penguins in there - it was hot, the penguins were passing out all over the place" (this bit accompanied by suitable flapping gestures) "and the papers got hold of it the next day, they wouldn't let it drop..."
I was especially tickled because there is a penguin-related adventure in my future, only it involves something so implausibly and extremely exciting to me, I still slightly believe it is not really happening - I will perhaps wait a bit longer for it to sink in, & for private gloating & contemplation, before I share the news...
Blogging will be sporadic over the next week or so, unless somebody has special pull with CUIT and can get me an Ethernet connection in my apartment with apparatchik-like celerity!
Friday, December 05, 2008
Moving
D-Day is next Friday.
Today I bought ten boxes at the hardware store.
Demurring at hardware-store box prices, I subsequently cadged eleven more boxes from a pleasant fellow at the liquor store. These boxes are in any case more appropriately sized for books, even if they carry a faint and mysterious scent of the grape....
I learned that the local branch of the public library will accept book donations. I loaded up the shopping cart and a couple of carrier bags and now have a tax receipt for 33 hardcover and 55 paperback books (the first of about three or four similarly sized loads, I am hoping). They were excited to get a good haul of newish hardcovers for this weekend's Holiday Book Sale!
(And I can donate clothes, bedding and housewares early next week at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.)
I returned c. 40 library books to Butler.
(I also broke the shopping cart - it is not designed for transporting books!)
I haven't started packing, but I am thinking it might be time to take the plunge.
Hmmmm, tip of the iceberg...
Today I bought ten boxes at the hardware store.
Demurring at hardware-store box prices, I subsequently cadged eleven more boxes from a pleasant fellow at the liquor store. These boxes are in any case more appropriately sized for books, even if they carry a faint and mysterious scent of the grape....
I learned that the local branch of the public library will accept book donations. I loaded up the shopping cart and a couple of carrier bags and now have a tax receipt for 33 hardcover and 55 paperback books (the first of about three or four similarly sized loads, I am hoping). They were excited to get a good haul of newish hardcovers for this weekend's Holiday Book Sale!
(And I can donate clothes, bedding and housewares early next week at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.)
I returned c. 40 library books to Butler.
(I also broke the shopping cart - it is not designed for transporting books!)
I haven't started packing, but I am thinking it might be time to take the plunge.
Hmmmm, tip of the iceberg...
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Real-estate confessionals
It's now sorted out for real - as of mid-December, I'll be in a new apartment. It seems like the window onto a new life!
I've lived in my current place for eight years, in other words for all of the time that I've been on the tenure track at Columbia. Now, I don't mean to grumble, I've been very lucky to teach here and to live in New York and so forth, but there is no doubt that beyond the already nerve-racking aspects of life on the tenure track when tenure is by no means a sure thing, the notion that one's housing is also entirely dependent on one's employment (almost all Columbia faculty rent from the university, because the housing stock is very nice and the rents are below market rates) represents another turn of the screw...
Now I have tenure, something that one of my colleagues (perhaps five years post-tenure) described as in her own experience working like a kind of IV of security, dripping reassurance and stability into her veins in a continuous and ongoing fashion. And I'm moving into a two-bedroom apartment - it's just round the block from my current place - so that I will finally be able to get my office out of my bedroom, an important development given that ninety percent of the time I'm working from home!
More room for triathlon equipment and bicycle, too.
I am still renting from my employer, so there remains a slight grace-and-favor aspect that I'm not crazy about, but given the realities of the New York housing market, that's just the way it's going to have to be, and I can definitely live with it!
I went over there this morning to take a few pictures, which I thought I would share here...
The floor plan, a classic instance of messy Davidsonian note-taking:
What you see when you first walk in (the view goes through to the south-facing bedroom/study at the front of the apartment):
.jpg)
The living room, which is the first room you come to after a short hallway (it's not super-bright, the windows look onto the building courtyard, but it's a gracious room, and the apartment has lovely high ceilings throughout):
Non-functional fireplace!
The kitchen (a dramatic improvement my current one, which has less counter space than you can quite imagine - I am going to get a counter-top coffee-maker, a novel idea!):
The sort of interstitial place that makes this type of apartment appealing:
The main bedroom, very bright (both bedrooms are south-facing and get a lot of light, a priority for me):
The study/second bedroom (corner door is a second bathroom - the other bathroom is in the hallway between kitchen and main bedroom):
The view from the study/second bedroom, which is what initially sold me on the apartment (I am a sucker for this kind of view - also, when I first saw it, there were still painters and workmen and dropcloths and ladders all over the place, it was too chaotic to get a really good sense of the space):
The feature that will change my life:
To the non-New York-dweller, it is inconceivable the extent to which a washer-dryer in the apartment is a luxury rather than a common feature - at my present place, I can do laundry in the machines in the basement, which is definitely a step up from the laundromat arrangement to which I became accustomed during grad school years, but there is something utterly lavish and decadent to me about the notion that I will shortly just be able to throw a few things in the wash without having to make a whole production of it!
I've lived in my current place for eight years, in other words for all of the time that I've been on the tenure track at Columbia. Now, I don't mean to grumble, I've been very lucky to teach here and to live in New York and so forth, but there is no doubt that beyond the already nerve-racking aspects of life on the tenure track when tenure is by no means a sure thing, the notion that one's housing is also entirely dependent on one's employment (almost all Columbia faculty rent from the university, because the housing stock is very nice and the rents are below market rates) represents another turn of the screw...
Now I have tenure, something that one of my colleagues (perhaps five years post-tenure) described as in her own experience working like a kind of IV of security, dripping reassurance and stability into her veins in a continuous and ongoing fashion. And I'm moving into a two-bedroom apartment - it's just round the block from my current place - so that I will finally be able to get my office out of my bedroom, an important development given that ninety percent of the time I'm working from home!
More room for triathlon equipment and bicycle, too.
I am still renting from my employer, so there remains a slight grace-and-favor aspect that I'm not crazy about, but given the realities of the New York housing market, that's just the way it's going to have to be, and I can definitely live with it!
I went over there this morning to take a few pictures, which I thought I would share here...
The floor plan, a classic instance of messy Davidsonian note-taking:
What you see when you first walk in (the view goes through to the south-facing bedroom/study at the front of the apartment):
.jpg)
The living room, which is the first room you come to after a short hallway (it's not super-bright, the windows look onto the building courtyard, but it's a gracious room, and the apartment has lovely high ceilings throughout):
Non-functional fireplace!
The kitchen (a dramatic improvement my current one, which has less counter space than you can quite imagine - I am going to get a counter-top coffee-maker, a novel idea!):
The sort of interstitial place that makes this type of apartment appealing:
The main bedroom, very bright (both bedrooms are south-facing and get a lot of light, a priority for me):
The study/second bedroom (corner door is a second bathroom - the other bathroom is in the hallway between kitchen and main bedroom):
The view from the study/second bedroom, which is what initially sold me on the apartment (I am a sucker for this kind of view - also, when I first saw it, there were still painters and workmen and dropcloths and ladders all over the place, it was too chaotic to get a really good sense of the space):
The feature that will change my life:
To the non-New York-dweller, it is inconceivable the extent to which a washer-dryer in the apartment is a luxury rather than a common feature - at my present place, I can do laundry in the machines in the basement, which is definitely a step up from the laundromat arrangement to which I became accustomed during grad school years, but there is something utterly lavish and decadent to me about the notion that I will shortly just be able to throw a few things in the wash without having to make a whole production of it!
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