More Than a Pet Project
Two left photographs by G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times; two right photographs by Tina Fineberg for The New York Times
Published: March 30, 2008
IT was the cats that caused Tania Dudina and George Kokoris to think about buying a place.
Last spring, the couple, living in a studio in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, adopted two cats. One had ringworm, a skin fungus. The cats, Loki and Pliooshka, needed months of treatment with medications, ointments and shampoos. They had to be kept apart, too, lest Pliooshka infect Loki.
So the couple borrowed two big metal animal cages, which filled the apartment. “In a studio, there was no way for us to separate the cats, so we thought the only solution was to find an apartment with more than one room,” Mr. Kokoris said.
They paid $850 a month for their studio, and assumed that upsizing would cost them around $2,000. If they needed to spend that much, why not buy?
Besides, owning a home was a goal for Ms. Dudina, 22, a student at Hunter College. She plans to attend graduate school for organizational psychology, a field in which she works part time.
“I haven’t lived in a house that my family has owned since I was 6 years old,” she said. That’s when her family immigrated to Bensonhurst from Ukraine.
She and Mr. Kokoris, 23, met at a mutual friend’s party. Mr. Kokoris, who is from North Salem in Westchester County, attends the School of Visual Arts and works as a video-game developer.
They thought they wouldn’t have much of a hunt for a home. A friend of Ms. Dudina’s family was thinking about selling a one-bedroom co-op on Shore Parkway in Sheepshead Bay, bought as an investment.
It was only around $150,000, but was some distance from the subway. So it made sense for the couple to live there for a while, pay the $600 monthly maintenance as their rent and decide whether to buy it.
The floors were scratched and uneven, so the couple hired someone to polish them. They had no idea that was forbidden by the co-op board. A $250 fine was levied, plus another $250 for transporting equipment in the elevator late in the day. “I had never heard that before — that you need permission to do something inside your apartment that doesn’t affect anybody else,” Ms. Dudina said.
Then they learned that only immediate relatives of the owner could stay there.
“We paid the fine because we didn’t want to cause trouble,” Ms. Dudina said. “We didn’t want to be living under that kind of surveillance with that kind of strict management.”
They decided to focus on condominiums within easy reach of Bensonhurst. “I want to be really close to my mother and grandmother if they need me for anything,” Ms. Dudina said.
Two-bedrooms near Bensonhurst, to their surprise, weren’t much pricier than one-bedrooms. Many apartments had extras like central air-conditioning and parking garages, which they didn’t care about. Their price limit was $360,000. “I am an obsessive saver,” Ms. Dudina said. “We have no expenses. We don’t spend, we don’t go out, we just have friends over for miniparties.”
They soon found their dream apartment, a duplex in a new building on East 14th Street in Midwood. It felt like a little house. “I went to sleep thinking about it and woke up thinking about it,” Ms. Dudina said.
“The magical part was a little garden, and the garden had a little cherry tree,” she said. “We were picturing ourselves and the cats running around and sitting in the sunlight and walking barefoot in the grass and picking cherries in our own backyard.”
They thought they could negotiate the price, but it went no lower than $400,000. “It is very important to me to make sure we have savings, and I didn’t want to be living paycheck to paycheck, so we would not be able to afford that — no way,” Ms. Dudina said.
An alternative was a duplex on East 12th Street in Sheepshead Bay, listed at around $360,000. They had the option of turning one room with high ceilings into two rooms with low ceilings. “I liked the feeling of a lot of interior space,” Mr. Kokoris said. “It was also very modern and very shiny. The place was sort of like an Apple store, which I got a kick out of.”
His 52-inch television set would fit, but there were so many windows they would need shades to block the glare. “One of the rules we made was we weren’t going to compromise on anything,” Ms. Dudina said. “If we can’t find something we both love, we will keep looking.” So they did.
There were possibilities on Coney Island, but they were in older buildings where Ms. Dudina complained about “other people’s dirt.” Mr. Kokoris said he found too many hallways or “little passages from room to room, and it felt aggravating because my parents are both architects so I grew up with a clear understanding of what usable floor space is.”
Then a Russian-speaking agent took them to a two-bedroom on 19th Street in Midwood. It even had a balcony, a “tiny little morsel of nature,” Ms. Dudina said.
Her Russian was better than the agent’s English, so she did all the negotiating in her mother tongue. “That was terrifying,” she said. “Those kinds of words are not in my vernacular. I had sweat dripping down my back.”
The two offered $350,000, which they increased to $360,000 when the agent said there was another offer. The common charge is around $165 a month. In late summer, they and the cats moved in.
“I feel we made the right decision every time we make a payment on the mortgage,” Mr. Kokoris said. “It feels good we are not paying a landlord for the privilege of living in the space. It stops being a chore and becomes, ‘Oh, cool,’ so that was one of the unexpected benefits.”
By the time they arrived, skin cultures showed the ringworm was gone, thus rendering moot “the entire reason for us looking — so we could speed up the ringworm rehabilitation,” Ms. Dudina said.
They enclosed their balcony in mesh wire, allowing the cats to romp outdoors. “George’s grandfather has grape vines, and he will give us grape vines to plant so we can grow them over the balcony,” Ms. Dudina said. “So instead of cherries, we will have grapes.”
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