Real Estate

I'm obsessed with real estate right now. I've been living in apartments for a very long time, moving from place to place, and always imagining what I WOULD do with the apartment if it were mine. Take out a wall here, paint the room a bright not-even-close-to antique white color, put some new flooring in, etc. All things I can't actually do as a renter. Right now I'm dying to put down a white laminated wood floor and take out a door in our current apartment. Not going to do it, but I'm sure I'll obsess over it the whole time we live here.

In the last apartment - the UES apartment - we had to do about $750 in improvements just to tolerate it. It was a horrible place. The floors were 2 inches lower towards the middle of the building, so everything ran down hill. The kitchen floor had vinyl flooring held down with DUCT TAPE, over a lumpy, uneven tile removal. We scrubbed the crap out of it and put rugs over it so we never had to look at it again. The bathroom floor tile was so disgusting, I covered it with press 'em tiles so I'd also never have to look at it again. We scrubbed until our skin cracked and bled, and what still wouldn't come clean, we painted over, including the pepto-abysmal pink bedroom and kitchen - ??? We used paint as a cleaning agent, caulking agent and repairing agent. The kitchen cabinets and countertop were starting to sink toward the middle and due to numerous leaks in the 100 year old pipes, they were starting to rot a little, too. It was a total rathole (somewhat too literally - the week before we moved out I found two rodents fighting over the garbage in the kitchen - eww!). It was the only apartment that I imagined torching for the insurance money if I owned it, and our rent was $600 more than the American median mortgage payment. Gack!

Our Astoria apartment is pure Grandma retro. Wood panelling, for reals. But it's really clean, has pretty good light and everything works. It's rodent free and the rent is cheap. It may not look as good superficially as the last one did after our ghetto rehab, but it's a million times more solid underneath. But it's not ours and never will be. We're priced out of Astoria already, which stinks. So, I keep web searching for what we can afford. It's amazing how many neighborhoods in NY we can't. The entire island of Manhattan, for instance. Conversely, we can afford half the apartments in the Bronx, none of which we want. There are only about 4 nabes left in Brooklyn in our price range: Sunset Park, Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach and Bay Ridge. Great water views, but WAY out there. We'll probably stay here in Queens because there are a lot of neighborhoods we can afford here, and many of them are actually less than a day's long commute to the city. I exaggerate, but seriously. Bay Ridge?!? You need a passport to get there, don't you?

The NY Times has a great real estate section online - you can look at all the pictures. Ryan made me stop looking at it and come to bed around 2am on Friday night. Like I said I'm obsessed. I can tell you exactly what $240,000 will buy you in Jackson Heights, Sunnyside, Woodside, Flushing, Corona, Bayside, Forest Hills, and all of the above mentioned Brooklyn nabes. Some of them, not much. Others a lot. I'm ready for a piece of the American dream. Even if it comes in a 550 sq. ft. package. At least it'll be mine. And I'll be able to paint it whatever color I want. Besides, who wouldn't want to live in a place called Sunnyside??

The Glory of Wash-N-Fold

I hate laundry. I don't know why, but doing laundry to me is just about the worst chore imaginable. I'd rather scrub the toilet than do laundry. At least with scrubbing the toitey, I get a sense of satisfaction when it's gleaming and smelling good. Laundry just sucks. There's the lugging of it to the mat, the loading the washer, the unloading the washer, the loading the dryer, the unloading the dryer, the folding, the lugging home, and then the putting away... Ugh.

Once I had an apartment that had a washer/dryer in it - that was a little better, but I still hated it. Instead of lugging 40 pounds of laundry to the mat once a week with an Us mag and a Dr. Pepper, I did multiple loads throughout the week at home, which made me feel like the live-in washerwoman. But no matter how onerous it was, I always did my own laundry, except for those rare times when I visited home and my ma did it before I could. (Bless you, ma!) The thought of someone else doing my laundry seemed like a luxury that only rich people who had "help" could afford. Then, I moved to New York.

Since moving to NYC, I've done my own laundry less than 10 times, because I discovered the glory that is the Wash-N-Fold service. I'm sure they existed in the other cities I've lived in, but nowhere else are they so prolific, so prominent. At my old apartment in the Upper East Side, there were two within half a block of each other - I didn't even have to cross the street to get to them. There was also a laundromat right next door to one of the Wash-N-Folds on our block, and for the first week or two after I moved I did my own laundry there. But one hot July day, after lugging 40 pounds of dirties down 4 flights of stairs, I just didn't feel like spending 4 hours in a stiflingly hot laundromat watching Spanish telenovellas on the mat tv, so I walked one door down and for the first time in my life, dropped my laundry off for someone else to do. It cost $0.65 a lb. - $26.00 to drop off the clothes, turn and walk away and not worry about it again until I had to pick it up the next day. Wow. What a bargain!! It would cost me almost $20 for me to do all that laundry myself, and in old machines that never seemed to get the smell out of Ryan's t-shirts no matter how much detergent I used.

The next day, I went to collect my laundry from the Wash-N-Fold. Like magic, the two HUGE bags I'd dragged in were now two tidy sized plastic wrapped cubes. When I got them home and opened them, the smell of freshness filled the air, and all of the clothes were folded into precise, tight little squares that let me fit about twice as many things in my drawers, which is a big bonus when your apartment is the size of a bread box. I knew right then and there, if at all possible, I would never do my own laundry again. A mere 30% differential in price for 100% freedom - delightful. Then I found out that my Wash-n-Fold picked-up and delivered... I never took advantage of that, because it was such a delicious, delightful thought, that it almost seemed perverse. I might go to hell if I indulged in that.

Over the course of the next year, Ry and I tried several of the Wash-N-Folds in our UES neighborhood. We'd evaluate them on price ("Wow, I found one that only charges $.55/lb!"), smell ("Hmmm. Not quite as mountain fresh...), fold ("Look, I can LITERALLY bounce quarters off this shirt!"), and turn around time ("Dude, they want 24 hours to do those 6 loads, who do they think they are!"). In short, we got spoiled. And it was GOOD. Manhattan is hard, and anything that makes it easier is GOOD.

When we moved to Queens, life got a little easier, and I thought I'd take the high road and go back to doing my own laundry. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, right? I was shocked and pleasantly amazed to find that it costs about half as much to wash and dry a load of laundry at the laundromats here, and like Manhattan, we have about 6 laundromats in a two block area around our apartment, so proximity isn't a problem. Again, I spent about two weeks doing our laundry before I once again realized that I HATE doing laundry. HATE it. So, I'm back to dragging 40 pounds of dirties to the neighborhood Wash-N-Fold. Strangely, the one thing that isn't cheaper here in Queens is the price of a lb. of laundry - it's around the same $.60-.65 here. Probably because no one really wants to do it, unless they're properly compensated for touching your dirty underthings. Makes sense. The only difference is that in this neighborhood, the Wash-N-Fold is run by a Latino family, and in Manhattan it was a Vietnamese family. Both can make laundry smell like flowers and fold clothes so tightly, they seem to defy physics. God bless them.