I realized that I actually don’t have pictures of the completed renovations of our old apartment: I never took any. The only extant photos of the post-combination layout was taken for the Corcoran site for the sale listing. Sigh.
Anyway, I grabbed these before the listing vanishes as a reminder of the old place. [...]
I had originally flown back home on September 25, expecting to stay until the following Thursday. The apartment closing was scheduled for Tuesday, and I had thought of spending a few days at my parents’ house, putting in a few hours at work, going to a class at the old dojo and generally relaxing [...]
We moved to Cleveland at the beginning of June. Actually, that’s an exaggeration: Grace and almost all the furniture have moved to Cleveland, and I came back to New York for the last few weeks to see through the sale of our apartment before packing what remains into a rental car and joining my [...]
At long last, the renovations are done, and we’ve combined apartments (just in time to sell before we relocate to Cleveland). The main delay was paperwork: months waiting for papers from the architect, getting approval and signatures from the management company and co-op board, getting the final stamps from the Department of Buildings. [...]
We’ll need to formally talk to an accountant about this (we’ll wait until after April 15, so they’ll be less busy), but the basic gist of the capital gains exemption for selling the apartment goes like this:
For capital gains purposes, the sale of the single 2BR/2BA will be considered a sale of something bought in [...]
Grace has now fully moved in. Our combined furniture fills both apartments, not tightly, but enough so that it becomes difficult thinking about where to put an extra bookcase. We’re leaving the common wall clean, in anticipation of future construction, but beyond that, all the walls have some sort of furniture on them, [...]
The closing for the apartment was yesterday. Hallelujah! The whole process has taken about half a year, was at least a month past contract, and survived a last minute scare when it wasn’t clear if Washington Mutual, which holds the old mortgage for my apartment, would be able to get to this closing [...]
I started this post as a note to myself almost a month ago, thinking it’d be useful for the upcoming alterations after I close on the neighbor’s apartment. “I’ll wait until after the closing before posting”, I thought.
It’s been a long month of waiting for the bank’s underwriter to dot the i’s and cross [...]
This is from the New York Times. Someone has written a paper on co-op/condo prices in Manhattan where the price components are broken down using regression analysis.
So, you get results along the lines of: a doorman adds on average 11.8% to the price, an extra bathroom is 15.5%, an extra bedroom is 18.5%, etc. [...]
I’m missing two documents from the co-op application right now:
A copy of my loan application to Chase. This was sent to Chase by email. I had forgotten I had done this, so I was searching around my documents archive looking for it for the past 15 minutes.
A detailed statement of the sources of [...]