Moving Sucks a/k/a Living in NYC Ain’t Easy
My family loves living in New York City. That said, our lives are constantly contorted by the fact that we live in this alternately weird and fascinating place. This is exemplified by our different living situations over the past 12 years or so. We owned a nice loft in the West Village, need more space, wanted to combine units and tried to work out a deal. We made a highly attractive offer to a neighbor who was prepared to move but wanted to constantly extort more money from us. No go. So we moved.
We then did a renovation of a place in the Central Village. Took a year of our life, a lot of planning and a nice chunk of cash to create a really special living situation. We loved it and would still be there right now if not for an absolutely horrid neighbor who didn’t appreciate my childrens’ existence. Most New Yorkers understand that by living here, you are not entitled to live in tomb-like silence. People walk. Kids play. Music plays. This couple, a childless couple in their 50s from down south, didn’t feel that way. So they chose to torment us so much that after a year we decided to leave. Life is too short to have that kind of stress on an everyday basis. Constantly telling our kids to quiet down, sit down, essentially, not to be kids. Wrong. We decide to sell the place and buy another place, this time in West Chelsea. A project. A big, big project.
We rented back in our old West Village neighborhood for what we expected was 12-18 months. Well, we are moving out next Thursday after nearly three years. And during the renovation of the new (well, it is actually an 1846 landmark building) place we had countless unforeseen problems, disputes with one of our neighbors that subsequently led to litigation, crumbling walls, flaky subcontractors, skyrocketing commodities prices, power-hungry Landmarks inspectors, prior permits that had never been received and needed to be gotten before work could start, etc. You just can’t make this stuff up. Tom Hanks’ depiction of such problems in The Money Pit doesn’t begin to approach what we’ve dealt with. Oh, well. That’s truly life in the big City.
So after all this we have the privilege of going through three years of accumulated junk in our apartment, not to mention going through all those boxes we had stored on an “interim” basis. And worse, we’ve gotten really attached to our interim place. It has great views, is close to the kids’ school and where they play sports. And to think, if the person in our first place had only been cool we’d still be living around the corner right now. What we’ve experienced is New York in a microcosm. It just happens. You need to roll with it or get the hell out. And we’re staying.
