It’s been another busy patch here at Chez Pablum, so please excuse the relative slowdown in regular service. I have a few smaller items in the works, but finding the time to crank them out hasn’t been that simple. Work has been demanding of late (this is not a complaint, mind you), and my family’s long-in-the-works endeavor to find a new place to live (now that my eldest has officially crossed the perilous Rubicon into teendom) has kicked into a higher gear. While it’s been something I’ve literally been discussing since Day #1 of this blog, we are finally taking steps to find new accommodations.
We’re actively scouting out new apartments all over town, kicking tires and crunching numbers. If you’ve ever tried to secure permanent residence here in New York City, you are doubtlessly aware of how stressful and jaw-dislocatingly expensive the process can be. Suffice to say, as someone with an inherent fear of change, it’s not something I’m exactly relishing. But, it’s something we simply must do. As much as we love our home -– the one we’ve been in since the tail-end of 2002, and the space in which we raised both our children -– we have pronouncedly outgrown it. With an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old of different genders sharing one small room with a bunk-bed, the fragile détente is under some serious pressure. They each need their own rooms, full stop.
The real-estate shuffle is a laborious dance punctuated by brief, frenzied instances of activity. The process of showing your own space and surveying potential new apartments can seem like an interminably ponderous purgatory of uncertainty and disappointment. You have to steel yourself up for let-down after let-down. One apartment you’ve read about fails to live up to your expectations, while the next seems practically perfect, … but just out of your budget’s range. Brokers aren’t always candid, let alone truthful. Parties interested in your apartment, meanwhile, will be cagey, fickle, indecisive, opaque and erratic. If you do happen upon a space you think could actually meet your needs and expectations, you have to snap into stealth mode and pounce before someone else snatches it out from under you. Fairness plays absolutely no role in the proceedings.
On a personal level, while my own feelings on the matter largely take a back seat to those of my wife and children -– their needs come first -– I am not-so-privately conflicted. This past weekend was largely spent putting vast quantities of our collective crap into storage (to make our apartment roomier and more “show”-friendly) and visiting open houses of varying sizes, prices and quality, the lone common thread between them being that none of the four we went to were right for us. The ones we have liked were either too far out of our price range, the maintenances were too high or they were snatched up before we could act.
But, we persevere. And we will eventually find the right place … one that will probably be in a neighborhood not quite as fun/cool/great/lively/interesting as our current one, but Needs Must, as they say.
Watch this space.
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