Archives for May 2010

Is that a Big, Giant Pipe in Your Living Room, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

May 27, 2010 by

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.

Filed Under: Advice, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Return from Exile: Take Me Out to the Ballgame!

May 10, 2010 by

One of the things I miss most about living in Manhattan was the ability to take a subway train to watch a baseball game.  As I’ve noted before, I’m one of those horrible heretical fans who roots for all the New York teams, so I used to love hopping the trains to go to either Shea or Yankee Stadium.  Going to Yankee games was always better, of course, not just because the team was better but also because Shea was a dump and the 7 train is a horrible, horrible train that seems to stop at every stupid street corner in Queens.  Seriously, can’t people from Queens walk a few blocks?

As much as I love football, there’s no question that it’s more fun to go to a baseball game.  Watching football live is a great experience, but baseball live is better for a bunch of reasons.

  • If you’re a football fan like me, the idea of watching only one game at a time is ridiculous.  You only get one day of games a week (other than Monday night football), so you have to maximize your football intake in that narrow window that you get.  So pretty much every Sunday, I used to hit the Gin Mill on the upper west side to eat the best and probably least healthy chicken fingers in the world and watch every game at once.  I do the same thing now, just at a bar in Nyack with much less tasty chicken fingers.  But watching just one game at a time is torture.  You don’t have that problem with baseball, since there are baseball games pretty much every day of the week and you don’t feel like you’re missing something if you’re actually at a game.
  • Watching football live makes you much more aware of all the artificial stoppages of play.  Moreover, you have to watch the halftime show instead of getting highlights, which is more torture.  In baseball, the play stoppages are more natural: at the end of innings, pitching changes.  Baseball is a terribly slow game, but at least you don’t get all these times where everyone just stands around waiting for the commercials to end.
  • Football is played at a bad time of the year in every kind of weather, usually very, very bad weather.  And because the tickets are so expensive, you end up going even when it’s raining and snowing and so cold that your testes freeze up (if you have testes, otherwise I guess some other plumbing freezes up).  But baseball?  Beautiful spring and summer weather, and if it rains they don’t play.  And if they play through the rain but you don’t want to sit there, you just don’t go and you eat what is likely a much less expensive ticket.

So going to baseball games is just the best. And being able to spontaneously decide to go to a game because you could hop a subway and be there in 45 easy minutes was one of the great things about living in Manhattan.

That’s one of the real pitfalls of living in the suburbs — the fact that you have to plan ahead, that you have to drive, that you have to park, and that you can’t drink because you have to drive home.  Just the worst.  No more spontaneity.  No more making fun of people sitting in traffic jams as you head to the subway, because you’re now one of those people.

With that in mind, I made my first trip into the city for a game this past week, trekking out to the new Yankee Stadium.  I only made one game to the new stadium last year, and only one trip to Citifield, what with the move and all, so I was looking forward to it.  And, of course, because I was so completely terrified of the traffic problems, I left like hours before I needed to.  The game was at 7:30, so I left at like 5PM, figuring that I wouldn’t get parked until 6:30 or so.  But of course for whatever reason there was no traffic, and no parking problems, and I end up in my seat at like 5:45, which is a ridiculously early time to arrive for a baseball game.  There were like kids running around on the field.

It did give me time, though, to check out the new stadium.  It’s actually pretty interesting how the Yankees and Mets took such different tacks in designing their new stadium.  The Yankees basically rebuilt Yankee Stadium as an exact replica of the old stadium, not just in the dimensions and the cosmetic touches but with everything. Yes, there are more luxury boxes and restaurants and food and stuff, and it’s a lot nicer walking around the concourse that is open to the sky rather than under a forbidding concrete roof, but it’s pretty much the same feel as the old stadium.  Nicer, but the same.

Citifield, though, is a complete departure from Shea, which makes sense insofar as Shea was a craphole.  While the Yankees had a stadium that was filled with all this great history and grandeur, the Mets had one of those awful all-purpose parks that was not so great for baseball.  But that freed them up to do a lot of cool stuff, and design Citifield along the lines of all those brand new baseball-only parks that have been the rage since Camden Yards opened about 20 years ago.  The end result is that Citifield is a MUCH better place to watch a game, which I know is heresy to Yankee fans but is simply the truth.  The team stinks, of course, which is more than a little important, but the ballfield is really nice.

That said, now that I’m driving to all the games and having to park, we’ll see how I like it when I have to stow my car over by the old World Fair grounds or under the Van Wyck.  At least I don’t have to make 45 separate stops on the stupid 7 train anymore, though.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, My Life in the Suburbs, Return from Exile Tagged With: , , , , , ,