San Francisco Real Estate Part 1

I've bought a house, or rather I've bought an apartment in part of a TIC in San Francisco which constitutes one quarter of a house. TIC stands for Tennancy in Common, which is kind of like a co-op in New York City and essentially means that while I'll have my own apartment, all four TIC members are mutually responsible for the one loan. What that basically means is that if one or more of the other people on the loan decides they're too strapped to cough up the cash one month then the rest of us have to find some way to cover their delinquent arses. Welcome to San Francisco real estate. Ultimately the goal is to get the house through the condominium conversion process, but that involves a lottery that can take upwards of eight years to pass. We're chained to each other now, married together by our idiotic desire to buy a chunk of dirt in one of the most overheated housing markets in the country, if not the world.

Coughing up large sums of money is nerve-racking. Yesterday, as part of the closing process, a wire transfer was made from my Morgan Stanley account to some mysterious number at Wells Fargo. It really could have been anyone's. I'm giving them over $100,000 - nearly all of my wealth - to some nameless money grubber at Wells Fargo. Holy shit, it shouldn't be that easy to gut yourself of everything you earn. Well, I suppose it is. That's why we have casinos.

Ikea = Hell

Don't ever try to return anything to Ikea. Just don't do it. If you have something in your hand that you think might be nice, say a lamp that looks like a block of Lush soap with an LED and a plastic monkey pulled out of a bag of chips shoved up inside it, then don't get it. You'll only have to return it a month later.

Tucked away in the far reaches of the Swedish tundra lies a bunker filled with bald-headed scientists devoted to analysing the extent of human endurance when placed in a stark, white room furnished with pine slat benches, staff trained to move with the exact oppose of the type of efficiency promised by the McDonalds-of-Furniture Ikea system, and no clock. No clock. Its absence couldn't be more conspicuous. If you had a clock ticking away in front of you you'd be acutely aware of the fact that the line simply isn't moving, and that number 47 has been sitting up there on the display for the last half an hour! And that's at 8pm on a Saturday night! Why does it have to be so hard? Why can't we just get our money back in a few minutes and get back to what we really want to do: shop! Those bunkered dorks high up in the Gulf of Bothnia need to pull their heads out of their collective arses and realise that if we weren't sitting around on our numbing butts we'd be back in the store shopping for shitty pine furniture with names like Plopp and Farrt. Ikea can take its bland, generic contemporary bedcovers and production line art for the masses and shove it up its arse.

Next time I'll go to the Container Store.