The "renting stage" of life

Things are looking good on the house. If all goes well we will close on April 26th. (photos will come when things are more official in a day or two).  In the meantime please enjoy our top ten worst moments of renting. (Totally stole the idea from my cousin Jamie who just bought a house and shared her top 5 worst neighbors)  When you read this you may wonder why we stayed in this place the whole time, paying 4 digit numbers in rent every month. Ummm I am asking myself that same question right now!

10. Tiniest bathroom ever. When we moved into our complex we lived in a one bedroom apartment, after deciding that we were not going to buy a condo here we decided to move to a two bedroom. When we moved across the courtyard I walked around the new unit and saw our bathroom and started to cry. It was half the size of our old bathroom and our old bathroom wasn't very big. There was no counter space, no drawers, no linen closet, just one cupboard under the sink and a narrow space in front of the tub. I somehow managed to organize the space really well to fit everything we needed  in there, but I have hated that bathroom every day of living here.

9. Loudest dishwasher ever. Seriously, the thing sounds like it is grinding all our silverware to dust. The first time my mom came to visit and turned on the dishwasher she thought something was wrong. "No that's how it always sounds"

8. Cockroaches. Every once in a while we find a gross black cockroach wandering around our apartment. Just a few weeks ago Christine came to me in the living room very distressed, "Mommy there is a bug in your room". There indeed was a cockroach in my room (dying a slow death after eating the poison in the cockroach boxes we have behind our fridge). When we first moved in, I would scream in terror and run to the other room while Jeff killed the intruder. But after years of experience I can now calmly kill the nasty thing pretty efficiently. The key is to be calm. If you move too fast the cockroach will bolt- usually under the stove or somewhere unreachable. But it you slowly back away, grab a flip flop (or some other cockroach killing tool) and then go in for the kill, you will be successful.

7. Valet Trash Service. You would think I would like for someone to come to my door every night to pick up my trash. But no, they don't have nice boxes outside our apartment to place the trash bags in, they gave us small ugly black garbage cans that we have to keep inside our apartment. When they introduced this new "service" a few months ago we complained about having to keep the garbage can inside and they told us that they didn't want the eyesores to be outside uglying up the place "and you think we don't mind the ugly thing inside?" The next issue is the matter of what to do with the garbage can we already own- the nice white garbage can with a step lever. Garbage cans are surprisingly expensive and we knew we were going to be moving in a few months so we weren't exactly going to be getting rid of our nice $50 garbage can that we will need after we move, so we have two garbage cans in our small dinky kitchen (we rebelled for a little while and kept it outside anyways until we got a few notices that we would be fined if we didn't keep it indoors). Then there is the matter of the service actually picking up the garbage. We are only allowed to place the garbage cans out after 6 pm (since they are so ugly) and then the service men come at unpredictable times and somedays (okay most days) not at all. We joke that they only come on full moons. It is very common to put our trash out at night and find it still there in the morning and have to bring the trash out to the dumpster anyways. We told the management that we would like to opt-out of the service, return the stupid trash can to them and just keep bringing the trash out ourselves. Nope, not an option because they supposedly have nowhere to store the trash cans.  sheesh. The worst part? they added this trash service because people wanted to have recycling bins but recycling bins had too many restrictions so they felt valet trash service was a good alternative. What?! where is the logic behind that?

6. Parking lot theft. After having two bikes stolen (with big metal u locks on them) we decided it would be cheaper for Jeff to ride the bus than to keep buying new bikes every few weeks. (these were not expensive bikes, they were cheaper than our insurance deducible so we couldn't even submit a claim on them)

5. Neighbors who don't know how to do laundry.  Let me start by explaining that in our apartment complex we don't have washer and dryers in our apartment units, we have several laundry room around the complex. These laundry rooms are free so there is nothing to discourage people from running small loads of laundry. I have gone into the laundry room to do some laundry only to find all the washers filled up and when I open the washing machine to see if there are clothes in there what do I find? TWO WASHCLOTHS and nothing else. really? you did an entire load of laundry to wash two washcloths? another time the washing machine was filled with one pair of socks and three baby outfits. The worst part about it was that the mom came in while I was loading my clothes into another washer and I watched her pour her laundry softener into the washer and run it through a second round.

4. Leaking AC. (I already shared this story on the blog, but it deserves to make the list) Immediately after moving in the air conditioner started leaking all over Jeff's clothes. We called the service man he came over and supposedly fixed it. We washed all of Jeff's clothes that got wet, hung them back up, and turned on the supposedly fixed AC and it started dripping again. We called maintenance back only to learn that the guy came over saw that it wasn't leaking any more (because we had turned the AC off)  and thought the problem was fixed. Luckily after the second time, with us standing over his shoulders this time to make sure he actually fixed it, we had no more problems with it.

3. Neighbors who do not know how to use a garbage disposal. We had these neighbors who used to live next door to us who would chop up an entire cabbage in their garbage disposal. How did we know this? because our pipes are connected and they would clog the pipes and water would start rising up into our kitchen sink. dirty water filled with chopped up cabbage. And every time this happened (yes, it happened on several occasions) we would call maintenance only to learn that they were already over at our neighbors unclogging their sink.

2. Bad Pipes. One morning I woke up hearing a weird glug glug glug noise coming from our bathroom I chose to ignore the weird sound and went back to sleep. A little while later Jeff went into the bathroom to shower, except he couldn't because the tub was filling up with a black sludge, and it was coming up the floor boards too, and the carpet in front of the bathroom was wet. A call was made to the management but Jeff was only able to leave a message, so he headed outside to find one of the maintenance workers. By that time the sludge drained from the tub. The worker came over only to spray everything down with a nose and eye-burning chemical spray and pull up the carpet and bring in a big fan to dry it all out. Jeff asked him what he was going to do about actually fixing the problem (instead of only cleaning up the mess it made) and he said there must have been a clog in the pipes further down and it must have worked itself out.

1. Flooding: During a tropical storm it was raining really hard for several hours. Jeff was at school studying for his Step One test. During big rainstorms it is very common for the courtyard of our complex to flood about 6 inches because the drainage here is really good. But this day the water kept rising and I kept nervously looking out the window watching the rising water get closer and closer to our front door. As it continued to rain, it finally  reached the doors and  kept rising higher. As I was watching the rising water levels out the french doors in our bedroom (in the back of our apartment) I noticed the carpet was wet. Oh great! I called Jeff and he was very casual about it, telling me I was overreacting. I called the apartment management and they said lots of people were having flooding and they would come over after the rain had stopped. sheesh, what do I do in the meantime? I raced around the bedroom pushing towels in front of the doors and sticking garbage bags underneath all our furniture and moving everything that could be moved off the floor. About 30 minutes later the water had made it's way across the whole bedroom. I called Jeff again in a panic. I told him the water had reached the closet, and that is when he finally believed me that there was a real problem going on at home. He wanted to come home but I told him if he came home I wouldn't open the door for him because there was a foot of water in front of our door and there was already enough water in the house. The rain finally stopped, and the apartment management sent a team over to move all our furniture from our bedroom and Christine's bedroom into our living room and dining room (the front of the apartment had managed to stay dry fortunately). They ripped up all of our carpet and brought in a billion fans and we were left to pack up and stay with Jeff's parents for several days while everything dried up. You would think after that the complex would do something  to improve the seal on the doors, replace something, caulk something, Nope. After that incident last summer I would get really nervous every time we had a heavy rain. Luckily we are moving before hurricane season comes back.