The condo we bought in Nyack was on the market for almost four years. It was one of those brutal stories of a seller putting a home on the market at the beginning of a bad real estate market, and pricing it just a little too high for the market, and then continually reducing it time after time, each time just, still, a little too high.
One of the reasons I think the condo sat on the market for so long is that it was very idiosyncratically furnished. It was gorgeous, with what were obviously very expensive furnishings. But they were a little bold for most people’s tastes — think the Liberace suite at a Vegas hotel. Okay, now ramp it up about 20%. There you go!
It’s actually a decent lesson about real estate, from both sides. From the seller’s side, it’s important when you’re trying to sell your home to “depersonalize” it as much as possible. Buyers sometimes have trouble seeing through the visual effect of a very intensely decorated home. Usually, of course, the challenge to the buyer is overlooking stuff like dirty windows, ugly furniture, and the fragrant wafting of cat piss, but sometimes it can be something as simple as a very tasteful, but highly stylized, method of decorating.
From the buyer’s side, though, it’s the reverse. It’s easy to fall in love with an immaculate home, and tough to fall in love with a place that makes you gag. But the smartest buyers realize that when the seller leaves, he’s taking that stupid cat with him along with all his disgusting furniture. That’s where the deals are. You buy a home in lousy condition (aesthetically, I’m not talking about something that’s falling down), you probably can get more of a discount than it will cost you to get it back up to shape.
So that’s kind of what happened with us. The seller had the place decorated to her taste, which was not universal, and I think a lot of people had a tough time seeing through it for the underlying value. But when she left, a lot of that stuff went with her.
One thing that didn’t go with her — actually, two things — were these giant plaster columns that were in the entry to the condo. I don’t know anything about anything, so I’m going to call them Corinthian Columns, although that’s almost certainly wrong. But you get the idea. Floor to ceiling plaster columns with intricate design work. Perfect if you’re making a speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, not so good if you’re a relatively mild-mannered couple who has a greater need for, for example, a coat rack.
So we decided to take down the columns, which we would replace with something a little less grand and little more functional. That’s when we discovered that one of the colunns concealed a floor-to-ceiling exhaust pipe. Big, black pipe, all the way from the floor to the ceiling. Ugly. Massive. Maybe that’s why they built a column around it. The column wasn’t great, but it was better than this pipe.
Of course, it was too late to do anything about it. One of the columns was already down, and we’d started demolition on the other. So we’re going to have to get creative, maybe redirect the pipe into the wall or something.
All of this, of course, is costing me a good deal of money. When people say that living in the suburbs is cheaper, they don’t count stuff like taking down columns and, maybe, having to put them back up again.
