Jessie Finley's Profile

I am on my second go-round of trying to sell my co-op apartment in New York and I fear I'm never going to sell the darned thing. I lost my job and have to move because I'm broke. I need some buyer's money badly. The buyer I found five months ago was paying all cash and my real estate agent said we'd be closing in a few weeks. She called me a few days later to say that the co-op board rejected my buyer because, though his credit was good, they discovered his wife once owned a vacation home and when she stopped paying the mortgage, it foreclosed. They don't want people like that moving here. Now I am back to showing my apartment to prospective buyers and hoping to make $30,000 less than I was going to make with the "bad" buyer. The market has actually tanked that far down since we signed the contract five months ago.
My problem is that during those months of waiting for the buyer to sign the contract, get his money together and fill out his co-op application, the owner of the upstairs apartment--she'd been subletting--returned after a couple years' absence and is repeating her pattern of walking back and forth on her bare wood floors in high heels for hours, dropping heavy objects that sound like bowling balls over my head and dragging furniture across the bare floor. God, she must have some deep scratches in her floor! I would never do that to mine! During my first problems with Stiletto Lady, before she sublet, I knocked on her door and asked her to kindly keep the noise down. I could see when she opened the door to me that she had no carpeting or rugs whatsoever. I mentioned this after describing the noises she made and said "did you know that the building has a rule that you have to cover at least 85% percent of your floors?" I said it would be considerate if she either covered her floors or stopped walking around in high heels and dropping things and dragging the furniture across the floor. She just gave me a dumb, innocent look and denied that she ever made noise, dropped anything or dragged furniture. This face-to-face meeting didn't help a darned bit. In fact, her noise got worse. Every week her boyfriend would visit. The sex they had was so loud and disruptive to my sleep that I finally lost it one morning at 4 am and hit the ceiling about 10 times with a broomstick. When I did that, I heard her laughing like a maniac. Then she got up and starting jumping up and down heavily to make even more noise --to get back at me. Honestly, if it was just the sex noises they had made, I wouldn't have cared that much, but she had a bed that must have had a bum leg because it would constantly crash against the floor whenever there was any movement in it. The bed would hit the floor with a bang back and forth all night long, keeping me awake. So after the bedroom ceiling started looking like cheesecake from my broomstick action, I started sleeping on my very comfortable living room couch. (Before putting the place up for sale, I re-plastered and repainted the bedroom ceiling myself to cover the broomstick marks.) After the sex incident, I wrote a long letter to management complaining about her lack of carpeting and all the noise she made, including the bed banging. A few months later, when it was apparent that she hadn't changed her routine, I checked in with management. Had they received my complaint? Yes, they had, but they had just filed it away somewhere. The office clerk couldn't find it. They didn't bother to contact me or her or tell her to put carpeting down or anything. "Oh, and by the way," the manager said," she is moving out and subletting." Well, that was great news. I was so happy. Her subletters turned out to be slightly less noisy, but they are gone now, so I won't talk about how annoying they were, letting their bird spray birdseed onto the bare floor all day and night and letting their granddaughter roll balls and assemble metal toys overhead and run back and forth across the bare wooden floors. They threw the grandkid a birthday party one day and had about twenty kids up there destroying the place. I had to make myself leave the building before I strangled one of the children running up and down the hallway upstairs screaming and hitting the walls. But back to Stiletto/dropsy/badbed Lady. Every morning now she is waking me at about 6:15 by dropping some heavy object right above where I sleep in my living room. Yes, I still don't use my bedroom anymore because now it's a habit I formed because of her sexcapades. I went up and knocked on her door one Saturday morning at 7am after hearing three bowling balls fall. She came to door in her robe and I could see once again, no carpets or rugs. "We've been sleeping," she said when I complained about the bowling balls. "It can't be us." I wondered who "us" was until I heard the distinctive sounds of her getting ready to leave her place the other day and ran upstairs and beat her to the elevator on her floor. Stiletto Lady came out of her apartment, letting the door bang and walking in her wobby hooker high heels with an ugly little dog who started barking extremely loudly as soon as he saw me. He barked more in the elevator, until Stiletto Lady finally calmed him. I don't know why, but I followed her out to the garage, just to see where she parked her oversized SUV. I wonder if there are surveillance cameras near her car? The dog is legal, but now I know where the sporatic yapping sounds are coming from. Lady Stiletto is still making her own noises. I have figured out the bowling ball noise is the combination of her flushing the toilet and slamming down the toilet lid. She must also be slamming the bathroom and kitchen cabinet doors. This along with the usual front door slams that announce her Ladyship's comings and goings. I have put off complaining to management because they never did anything the first time and frankly, I hope I will be moving out of here very soon. If I ever sell. I'm so afraid of showing this place to prospective buyers in the morning or evening or on the many days Stiletto seems to be home sick. I will be so happy when I'm in my new home. I am looking to pay cash for a small, cheap house in another state with no one above or below me. I swear I will never live in another apartment, especially a co-op apartment, again. I'd rather live in my car than ever have another inconsiderate, self-centered asshole living above me again.