Anonymous

My husband and I had been renting for five  years when we put an offer on a two-bedroom co-op in Inwood.  We had no idea what to expect about the process or the interview.

The seller’s real estate agent prepared the co-op board package. When we looked over the nearly 100 pages, only 18 were things we needed to sign, and the rest were rules. The attorneys went back and forth about some items in the contract (not the rules) and finally I said “fuck it” and signed. 

(Ed.'s note: We don't usually hear from people who are thrilled with their new construction experience, so when we heard this one, we had to post it.)

Last summer, my husband and I bought a car for the first time since living in New York City. After the first week of dealing with the alternate-side-parking situation in our Prospect Heights neighborhood, we thought we should look for a new rental in a building that had a garage attached to it.

A few years ago, my wife and I bought a 700-square-foot duplex in a 150-unit condo building on the Upper East Side.  We found out pretty quickly that the super, Alek, was running the building like a Mafia don with the help of the board president.

Every morning Alek and the president, Mike, would have coffee across the street to decide who they were going to f--- up the a-- today. 

At first, it sounds like a fairy tale: A couple finds a beautiful Soho loft that is inexplicably reasonably priced. They furnish it and settle in, and everything is perfect.

And then...the horror.

No, it isn’t bed bugs or crazy landlords. It’s my father.

See, my dad is an artist who makes twenty-foot-tall metal sculptures. Seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., he welds and grinds and grinds and welds.

After a four-year love affair with our Greenwich Village rental, my husband and I decided it was time for a change, time to stop paying "the man," time, maybe, to grow up a little bit.

I wasn’t really nervous about my recent board interview. Coming from a small, self-managed co-op in Manhattan, I felt coolly confident applying to a similar one in Brooklyn. After all, I not only had experience being in the hot seat, I’d also been part of the judging panel multiple times before and had a pretty good idea for what they were looking for: A quiet, respectful, and (no pun intended) low-maintenance person who'd pull their weight when it came to coop responsibilities.