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It took over four hours, a record long time for our co-op, but we closed on the sale of our apartment.

Our bank, Washington Mutual failed to send crucial documentation (let alone a representative): the stock certificate, lease and UCC3. For reasons no one can explain, WaMu expected the buyer’s bank to take their word for it and just hand over the payoff funds and the paperwork would catch up in thirty days. My lawyer didn’t notice this foul up and the whole deal nearly went into the can. Even if he had noticed when we received the downpayment, WaMu requires 30 days to retrieve documents and won’t file for a lost document certificate until after 45 days, so we would still have been stuck.

The lawyers- mine, theirs, their bank’s, my bank’s (by phone) and the co-op’s wrangled for two hours. Finally, they reached agreement. WaMu walked over a letter declaring their intent to produce the paperwork and the UCC3 form retiring the loan, the buyer’s bank accepted the UCC3 and the co-op’s lawyers made an exception and drew up their own letter to allow the sale to proceed. I had to sign a bunch of indemnity forms.

WaMu wants to operate in the New York City Co-Op market and has competitive rates but is under the misapprehension that they can handle these deals like any other mortgage. At least Dime bank had the good sense to admit they didn’t do it well and stay out. Their origination people are all but entirely uninformed and this was compounded by our mortgage broker’s colossal ineptitude and ignorance as they themselves tried to get into the Co-Op mortgage market. Their customer service people are pleasant but also uninformed about Co-Ops.

I would never consider them for a Co-Op loan in the five boroughs.

On the recommendation of dslreports and that of several casual friends (not to mention the general good reputation) I signed up with speakeasy, opting for their “cable killer” adsl and their “SysAdmin” package and took advantage of every special offer and rebate they had going. Right now, I’m on dial-up while my line is provisioned. I seriously doubt I’ll see anything near 6Mbit/s downloads but for $10/month more than 1.5M I thought I would take the chance. So far, very good company with which to deal.

The movers finished in one day but it took me seven more round trips over that and the following two days to get the last of our stuff to the new apartment. I am expert at packing the Volkswagen but we are not expert at packing for a move and there was a room-sized pile of things- bags of clothes, computer equipment, potted plants, foodstuffs and odd-sized/shaped or fragile- that need to be hand moved. Even with the top down there is a limit to how much you can hope to move in one trip. This long weekend, while I suffered more than sixteen hours of torments from the bitch goddess of travellers, “Traffic”, Maria unpacked and found places for our things. My routine consisted of waking up early to get a jump on the other drivers then a lather, rinse repeat cycle of checking the traffic reports on AM radio to try and game the highways, driving the all of 25 miles door to door, spending thirty to forty minutes loading the car, repeating the radio check and returning (losing, and spending more time in traffic) and in twenty minutes unload car. Then, before turning around to do it again, I would move what ever heavy things need to be positioned and take something to eat on the way.

Moving day is tomorrow and we’re almost packed. I lost a couple of hours on the couch- it’s too long to fit out the door and into the elevator so I had to remove the arms. It’s something of a process. It’s real furniture and you have to carefully undo tacking strips beneath the trim to reach the frame, but it took long mostly because I had left both sets of tools over at the new apartment. I ended up borrowing from the Superintendent. A little embarrassing.

So much packing. Somehow there’s always more in an apartment than anyone can estimate but we thought we had enough of materials. Not quite. I had to scavenge additional boxes from some people who recently moved into the building. They even had a tall wardrobe box. Later, I had to pull newspapers from the building recycling bin. Even now, close to midnight, there are still some things left out. We’re getting up early tomorrow to finish and I’ll return on Friday and Saturday to get whatever is left.