Bethany Larson

We were supposed to sign a lease yesterday.

Big, bright, shockingly clean 1BR apartment in Brooklyn with no history of bedbugs. Directly across the street from the subway. The current tenants are moving to L.A. and were told by their landlord to find someone to take over their lease.

Enter me and The Boyfriend.

We meet with the current tenants, clearly love the place (and the tenants. It’s really too bad they’re moving to L.A.), and tell them we love and we’ll take it. They say great, wonderful, huzzah, we’ll let our landlord know and put you guys in touch.

So we get in touch with the landlord. We send him the extensive identity verification and credit reports and proofs of employment. We pass that portion and we set a date to sit down and sign the lease. We tell friends and family members that we’re moving to  Brooklyn, buy a piece of furniture that we know will look great in the place, and start talking about the dinner party we’ll host in the new apartment.

And then yesterday happened.

The landlord calls me and says, “You know, I’ve been thinking it over and I’d rather have tenants who can stay for the entire year. Can you sign a year-long lease?”

Normally, people looking for housing in NY would jump at this opportunity. Unfortunately, The Boyfriend works in a job that kind of takes him all over the world and we currently don’t know where he’s going next, so we don’t feel comfortable signing a year-long lease knowing that perhaps we’ll be breaking that lease. We’re honest people like that.

So I tell the landlord that we’re really looking for something shorter-term, that the four month lease takeover is perfect, but we could do six months. He tells me no, he needs someone to do a year-long lease and that he’ll destroy all of the copies of our identify verification blah blah blah. And that’s that.

That leaves me sitting in my office, freaking out. I thought we had an apartment. We were done. We had a place. We let my current landlord know we’d be leaving and in fact, she’s showing the place today. So I text The Boyfriend to let him know we won’t be signing the lease and he reacts about the same way I do, except with more expletives. He gives himself time to cool off and then calls the landlord. He offers more money per month, says we’ll do six months no problem, uses lawyer-ese on him, but alas. It’s no use.

While The Boyfriend is doing all of that, my boss is telling me about the new organization system she’d like me to put into place. It completely contradicts the last organization system she asked me to put in place and is tangential to the system she asked for prior to that. I’m trying not to cry in her office as she explains exactly how I don’t have her best interests in mind and how she is never able to do her job because I can’t keep her properly organized.

So I’m reorganizing and searching Craigslit and trying not to have a serious panic attack all at the same time.

Because here’s the kicker—finding an unfurnished, shorter-term, 1BR apartment in/around New York is damn near impossible. We don’t want roommates. We have furniture, we don’t need a furnished place and we don’t want the extra expense of putting the stuff that we probably like more than the furnished place’s stuff in storage.

I know I shouldn’t complain about this. People have it far worse. The fact that I have a place and a job and a boyfriend and furniture should be a blessing. And it is. I’m very grateful for my life.

But I’d be more grateful if I were able to sign that lease. Searching for an apartment is a bitch.