IT was the cats that caused Tania Dudina and George Kokoris to think about buying a place.
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The Hunt: More Than a Pet Project
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.”