The Joys of Renting
May 6, 2008 @ 5:34 pm

So we gave our one month's notice on April 14th saying we were moving out May 15th from the apartment. Naturally we expected to only pay half a month's rent for May, since we would be here half a month. They charged me half a month to move in in the middle of January, so why should it be any different when moving out?

The first came and they tried to take the $645 out of my account. Of course, it wasn't there. They did the whole Notice of Blah Blah, slid it under the door stating we owe them $645 plus an extra thirty dollars for Non-Sufficient Funds fee.

This morning the landlord buzzed in, but I didn't know it was the landlord. I thought it was a package my Nana had ordered for me, containing the crib set. No one answered when I asked who was there, so I just buzzed them in and put on some pants and waited for a knock at the door. The knock came but it was that dumb knock my super has, followed by "Super!"

I stood there for a second wondering if I could get away with pretending I wasn't home, but realized he had pulled a dirty trick by buzzing in first, so I tried to unlock the door but the lock was jammed. This has been happening quite a bit lately and can get pretty annoying. I can't even leave the house because I am afraid I won't be able to get back in.

"It's stuck again," I said furiously through the door. He knew what I was talking about since he had been here last month collecting rent and I had to unscrew the lock from the inside to let him in, thank God my dad gave us some tools or I would have just been trapped.

"That's okay, I was just wondering when you planned to pay your rent?" he hollered through the door, loudly.

I lied and told him this week sometime. I have no intention of paying a full months' rent for an apartment I can't even get out of, and to make matters worse when Jamie got home from work he opened the closet door and it fell off. I had told the landlord that the hinge was loose when I first moved in, and not long after that the hinge started coming right out of the door. I've stopped opening it just because I have to prop it up so the hinge doesn't fall off. So here's the door hanging open by one hinge and a busted lock, and those things are within 2 feet of each other.
When I came to look at the place originally it appeared pretty decent, a bit expensive but good location. I am close to the grocery store and Zellers, the dollar store, Shopper's Drug Mart, everything. The floor in the kitchen was pretty banged up and I could tell the carpets were put in sometime around 1970, but the rooms were a decent size and the living room was huge. The appliances and bathroom seemed really clean and I liked that there was a closet next to the bathroom to keep towels and sheets in.

So when I moved in I was unpleasantly surprised. The first thing I noticed was that although it had seemed clean it wasn't really clean at all. I spent most of the first few days cleaning out the cupboards, which were full of onion skins for some reason. I cleaned the bathroom where you couldn't see just by looking, under the soap shelves in the tub surround was coated in that hard soap drip crap that is totally gross. Behind the toilet is still black, I tried to wipe it down but I think it is there forever.

I bought a cheap vacuum at Sears and vacuumed the floor, which brought up lots of Christmas tree needles. It was obvious that they hadn't actually had the floors cleaned at that point. But the candle wax all over the bedroom carpets should have been my first clue.
After washing and drying the towels my Grammie had given me, I opened up the linen closet to discover either mold or rust or something all over the floor by the water heater.

I swept the kitchen and bathroom floors, which is to be expected because people walk through there with their shoes on a lot. Then I scrubbed what appeared to be tomato soup or spaghetti sauce off the wall by the stove.

The refrigerator was pretty clean, so I went and bought some groceries and discovered that I didn't really need to buy cheese because someone had left an old moldy block of it behind in the cheese compartment! I threw that out and filled up the fridge. I turned on the oven to make some fries and chicken nuggets. It was preheating when all of a sudden I noticed a terrible smell. I went to the oven and opened it up, someone had sprayed cleaner inside of it, and then apparently didn't do anything else. So I was baking some kind of unknown cleaner, and the fumes were coming into the apartment, and I was breathing them in. This is a pretty unsafe practice for pregnant people.

So, middle of January I have all the windows in the apartment open trying to get rid of the smell. I had no idea what kind of cleaner had been used so I had no idea if I was even safe to finish the job of cleaning the oven or if I had to wait for Jamie to come a week later and do it for me.

Hunger won out a couple of days later as I scrubbed the horrible smelling yellow cleaner out of the oven, once again with the window open, making sure I took plenty of breathing breaks.

And the floor creaks. Everywhere. In every room.

They should really be paying me to live here, and not the other way around. Even the laundry room is disgusting, no one cleans it except to empty the garbage. There is detergent and dryer lint all over the place down there.
I can't wait to get out of here next Thursday!

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