tell me about your shitty apartment

[squeeeb]

i live in an old house that has been divided up into four apartments.

other than being generally old and dirty and falling apart.....

i have no cold water. i only have warm and hot water.

the toilet and shower are in what i think was a closet. my shower has an on/off lever. there are hot and cold knobs below it, but much like men's nipples, they are purely cosmetic.

the room where my mattress is (dont have a bed) is slanted, so i sleep on an angle.

windows and doors are not flush, so its not actually "sealed" so im subject to whatever temperature is outside.

ok, tell me about your shitty apartment.

[genuinegirly]

That makes my apartment look luxurious.
We have both a wasp nest and a hornet nest directly outside our door and they frequently make their way into the apartment. Management of course sees nothing wrong with this.

I've mentioned the dog poop issues in another thread. Poop. Everywhere where there once could have been landscaping has piles of poop.

Our kitchen has nasty old carpet. Ever heard of a fire hazard?

Our master bedroom has wood flooring and looks beautiful in photographs. Unfortunately what the photographs don't show is the splinters that you receive when you attempt to walk on it either barefoot or with thick socks.

A previous tennant decided it was a good idea to set a hot pan on the laminate countertop, leaving a nasty burn mark. The same imbicile chose to use the laminate as a cutting board, leaving some nasty knife marks.

I can never make the place feel entirely clean - it's a dump, the management doesn't care to fix any issues, and they've decided to raise rent $100/month.

Needless to say, we're moving at the end of June.
The next place will have slightly less square footage and less of a view, but at least we won't be living in a safety hazard. It's also about $100/month less than we're currently paying.

[wooÐs]

Originally Posted by genuinegirly

...I can never make the place feel entirely clean - it's a dump...

That's a miserable feeling - I'm right with you on that.

I'm in a house that I've lived in for about 11 years. I rent it from my Mom. I've been through a lot in those 11 years including drug abuse and severe depression. My carpet may as well be one big puppy pad. I had one dog who, in her old age, just pee'd or poo'd whenever she felt like it. And because I was so strung out and / or depressed, I wasn't quick to clean it up. My walls are stained with soot damage. I have arched ceilings so I can't reach to clean the fans unless I get on a ladder, which I'm not doing lol. There must be 2 inches of dust on the blades. And not to mention how this dump is saturated with bad memories of all the shit I've been through.

The good news is this is all being remedied this year. We've worked it out so I can meet Mom halfway on carpet replacement and paint, etc. I will never allow my home to get so horrible again. But yes, I know what you mean when you say you can't ever get it feeling completely clean.

[Martian]

Wow, reading all of this makes me feel really good about my apartment. It is most definitely not a dump. Biggest complaint is that the previous tenant did something of a hack job installing the air conditioner she sold to us, and we're going to have to reinstall it properly to get rid of the draft.

My previous apartment, now that was a hole. It was a converted attic, and all of the ceilings were sloped. I hit my head in the shower. And the wiring sucked, so I couldn't run the AC and the TV at same time. It made watching movies in the summer a bit of an exercise. The kitchen was tiny, the fridge never seemed to work right, and my downstairs neighbour had a pair of dogs that barked all bloody day and night.

I'm much happier now.

[iwst99]

980sq ft.

55lb German Shepard

No Yard.

Sheds a lot.

/story

[Redlemon]

Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.

/ obligatory Python

[Crack]

I can hear pigeons right now. I am upstairs. It is dark out. They sound like they are getting closer. If this is my last post... AVENGE ME!

[Glory's Sun]

Originally Posted by iwst99

980sq ft.

55lb German Shepard

No Yard.

Sheds a lot.

/story

that's a tiny GSD.

and wow.. why would you have such a high energy dog in a place that small with no yard?

don't take it the wrong way.. I have two 100+lb GSD's and can't imagine them being cooped up in an apartment.

[shakran]

My first apartment was an 1,100 square foot 2 bedroom palace. For 325 a month. That should have told me something. Insulation was nonexistant, the shower collapsed (while I was showering, no less), and the landlord took 6 weeks to fix it. The floors creaked, the water heater was so calcified that it sounded like constant explosions were going off in the basement, the holes in the walls were big enough to admit the usual mice and rats, but also gophers. I can report that gophers are highly entertaining when they are pissed off. I can also report that they tend to be pissed off 100% of the time when indoors.

Moving to the outside, it was, unbeknownst to me till I had moved in, across the street from a halfway house. Sometimes the inhabitants would stand on the roof and fire handguns down toward the street.

I can't say I miss that place.

[iwst99]

Originally Posted by guccilvr

that's a tiny GSD.

and wow.. why would you have such a high energy dog in a place that small with no yard?

don't take it the wrong way.. I have two 100+lb GSD's and can't imagine them being cooped up in an apartment.

When I met my BF he had the dog, as well as a 2600sqft two story home, with a huge area for the dog.

Situations change. Will be out of there soon. I think my now ex is giving the dog away, hopefully to someone with a big yard.

[777]

Last year, my goal was to find the cheapest place I could rent. Mom was driving while I was answering ads on Craig's list from my phone.

In a very industrial area, we found a moble home park, and this little old lady was renting out a room. On the floor was a mat that the last tent used as a bed, about the size of a sleeping bag (which I used instead). This "bed" took up half of the room. It had windows on three of the walls, and those were made of a thin layer of plastic where there should have been glass. The wind passes straight through it's crevices, so it gets cold at night. Good thing it was spring time in Los Angeles.

After my first night there, I came to a realization about this room that wasn't really a room. The wall with my bedroom door is made of the same metal that the outside walls of the moble home are made of. The door has a lock, but it locks from the outside. The light switch is in the laundry room, nest to the outside of my door. This room is actually an extension that was added to the back door of the "house". And to top it all off, a dresser full of papers and bags of old clothes were kepted in "my room" for storage. At least I was supplied with a portable closet for my clothes.

Luckily, just as winter was coming, I was able to switch the the living room. A curtain was set up as a 4th wall, but at least I'm near the heating vent. It's also much more spacious (10ft X 24ft), but at the cost of privacy.

And there's pictures of her family all over the walls.

[KellyC]

Lock on the bathroom door doesn't work.
No screen on windows. Bugs come in if I open it. But if I don't then i'll have to put up with the heat.
Back door is particularly vulnerable to intrusion as there is no fence in our supposed "patio."
Bathtub and sink in the bathroom have very poor drainage. A five minute shower with full strength stream and the water will rise up near my ankle.
The lid in the tank of the toilet wouldn't close properly some times. This makes it hard for water to fill up the tank and thus water keep on running and running and running, it gets annoying since my room is right next to the bathroom. I hear everything.
Water has that metallic smell to it. Yuck.
Small kitchen sink.
The power in my room and the adjacent room would go out if there are too many appliances running at once. Like...3 or 4...

[Glory's Sun]

Originally Posted by iwst99

When I met my BF he had the dog, as well as a 2600sqft two story home, with a huge area for the dog.

Situations change. Will be out of there soon. I think my now ex is giving the dog away, hopefully to someone with a big yard.

hey I totally understand things and situations change. I wasn't dogging you.. just curious, that's all

how old is the GSD?

[alicat]

In the early 90's we lived in a 130 yr. old victorian building in "Old" downtown. The downstairs was a store front (antiques) and up a very steep staircase was our apartment in the back and a studio in front.

It had alot of character, brick walls, nearly floor to ceiling deep set windows and original moldings on the doors. That was all it had going for it. Because the building was all brick it was a sanctuary for centipedes that came in droves from the gaping hole under the sink from water leaks. Not fun trying to fall asleep and then feel one of those suckers run along your arm.

The landlord was completely lazy. The outside door at the bottom of the stairs just had a hole where a deadbolt used to be. In winter, snow would blow in and build a nice little drift that sometimes made it hard to get out. The wall opposite the door housed our bathroom plumbing, so yeah, multiple times a winter we'd wake up to frozen pipes. On top of that, our furnace was in a closet off of our small shared landing and it pumped most of our heat out there instead of the apartment.

This started out as built-in entertainment but it quickly got old. Our neighbor in the studio had basically an old converted closet as his bedroom that shared a thin wall with our livingroom. He always had lady freinds over and if not, he was a great fan of making love to himself. The constant rhythmic squeeking of his bed springs eventually became like nails on a chalkboard. Thank God he worked on Alaskan fishing boats so we'd get peace for months at a stretch.

On last thing was that we had no fire escape. If we had needed to get out, the best chance would've been to jump/fall to the little roof over the basement stairwell.

Weird, I just had a major sense of deja vu, I swear I've written about that place before. Eh, to lazy to check.

[fresnelly]

Boy, I don't miss the old apartments

At one, the Landlord turned off the heat in the hallways. During the winter the pipes on the floor below us burst and I awoke to see a chain of firefighters channelling the waterfall down the stairs.

Another was on the top floor of a house. It was fine overall but the landlord was a hoarder and you had to squeeze through a cave of garbage bags and boxes in the basement to get to the washer and dryer. It was a big old mansion but the entire basement, save for the laundry area near the door was completely impassable.

The landlord also made us take off our shoes at the ground floor entry because she was worried about us tracking in lead and poisoning her children.

I always laughed at my friend's apartment in which the kitchen was literally in the closet. You stepped in and the stove was on your right, the sink on the left and two cabinets were above on each wall.

My wife lived in one on the ground floor and next to a parking lot that was popular for a nearby nightclub. Everynight after Last-Call, it filled up with noisy, drunken douche-bags getting into fights and revving their engines. During the winter we would be woken up by the snow plows scraping it clear at 4:30 in the morning.

Good times!

[dlish]

i live in a shit hole.. ...ill unfortunately be moving very soon

[iwst99]

Originally Posted by guccilvr

hey I totally understand things and situations change. I wasn't dogging you.. just curious, that's all

how old is the GSD?

She's almost 3. She's never been well trained though, she's always had issues with that, and all his previous GSD were well trained. She causes a lot of problems. Destroying furniture, eating a lot of my stuff, including: Clothes, important mail/paperwork, prescription drugs that were mailed. Whenever you walked her she had to eat EVERYTHING. Food, dog poop, bags. You'd had to literally reach down her throat to pull stuff out. If someone she doesn't often see comes over she jumps on them and won't get off the whole time. We could be in the same room as her and put a gate so she can't come over to us (in case we're having people over and chatting or having drink) and she would bark like crazy and not stop. We could literally be 2ft away and she would be hollering like we were kicking her. And don't even try to put her in another room because she'll never stop. Even dog lovers, who had dogs, liked her at first and thought she was playful, but eventually got tired of her. Or people that would say "I would love to take care of your dog!" would never want to after they did it once.

Sorry...I went off there, I'm just venting I guess. I love dogs, but geez, it's like I ended up with someone that had a rowdy 5 year old kid. It didn't help that I could never wear black without having to use a roller for 20 minutes beforehand. She deserves a good loving home with someone with a lot of patience that is willing to train her like she should be. My ex didn't want to spend more money on more training. Oh well, that's over.

[Glory's Sun]

is the dog a full breed? Just curious because 55lbs is a tiny GSD. Also sounds like there wasn't enough training. You say she's always had issues with training, but that really just means there wasn't enough time spent finding the right technique. woah..wait.. what you spent money on training? there's your problem right there. you have to train the dogs yourselves. sure it helps to get some guidance, but if someone else trains them, they are learning and trusting that person not you or your ex..so naturally, what happens when that person is gone? they just go back to doing whatever they want.

:shrug: best of luck to you and the dog..

I'm gonna stop this threadjack now

[squeeeb]

dlish - sorry to see you suffering like that. that's just inhumane. hang in there, i'm sure it'll get better.

[Grasshopper Green]

The shittiest place I ever lived was 1 apartment ago - we had a tiny basement apartment and it was crawling with house centipedes. Ugliest, creepiest damn insects EVER. There was no air conditioning, and there was no outdoor air vent for the dryer so in the summer time the hot air from the dryer stayed inside and it was hot as Hades' armpit. The carpets were old and filthy. The bathroom ceiling leaked from the apartment above us. The shower had an old sliding glass door and despite my best efforts, it never seemed clean and I hated it. The neighbors were batshit crazy. The landlord did not remove the snow from the parking lot, so you took your life into your hands every time you stepped foot outside during the winter. This was also the apartment my brother died in, and the landlord wouldn't let us break the lease a month early - I couldn't live there anymore. We broke it anyway and they kept our deposit. Man, I was glad to get out of that place.

[Xerxys]

I'd just like to chime in with squeeb and say I also feel terrible for dlish.

dlishs, I will make every effort possible to ensure that if we could trade places, I can make it happen. You can COUNT on me!!

[777]

Originally Posted by dlish

i live in a shit hole.. .

Show off

Originally Posted by dlish

...ill unfortunately be moving very

Yeah... that doesn't make us feel any better

[PonyPotato]

My apartment isn't a shithole, but I do get lots of bugs and dust since it's built above a barn.

Luckily, my landlord was kind enough to clean all of the (crawling) bugs and a giant spider out of the light cover in my kitchen. I often come home to find my kitten scooting a bug or three across the kitchen floor like miniature hockey pucks.

[wooÐs]

This thread makes me grateful lol.

[soma]

Some friends in college used to live in this one very seedy apartment building. Cracked paint, dirty carpets, and worst of all, the smell. Every once in a while, I would sleep over after drinking myself silly and end up smelling like damp, dirty, apartment. It was in a really convenient location however, and was quite cheap.

[dlish]

squeeb..yeah i'm toughing it. dont know how long i can handle this for dude...

777 - im moving to a place thats much bigger with better views. not happy with the views ive got now.. :P

xeryxs - i did offer my place as a house swap a while back.. i got no offers! offers off the table now that you're interested in the place :P

sorry guys, dont mean to be a pain in the ass..but someones gotta liven the place up...its depressing hearing some of these stories...if its any consolation, ive got a water leak in my ensuite ceiling

[snowy]

When I first moved in with my SO, he lived in a pretty crappy apartment. The bathroom had really poor ventilation and so the walls were always covered in mildew. It had an AC unit in one of the bedrooms, but you couldn't turn anything else on when the AC ran. The bedrooms both had south-facing windows, which meant they both turned into tiny ovens in the afternoon as we were also on the 3rd floor. We had a balcony, but the roof covering the balcony let little sunlight into the north-facing windows of the living room, which meant most of our living space felt like a dark cave.

And when I cleaned that place, I always felt like I couldn't get it really clean. Even when we moved out, and I gave the whole place a good scrubbing, it still felt dirty.

We were sooooo glad to get out of there! The townhouse we moved into after that wasn't the greatest, but it was a significant improvement. And now we live in a super awesome house

[Xerxys]

Originally Posted by PonyPotato

My apartment isn't a shithole, but I do get lots of bugs and dust since it's built above a barn.

Luckily, my landlord was kind enough to clean all of the (crawling) bugs and a giant spider out of the light cover in my kitchen. I often come home to find my kitten scooting a bug or three across the kitchen floor like miniature hockey pucks.

Pony What the hell???? The instant I saw roaches in my apartment I threatend to break the lease. It was gonna cost me $800 and when the fuckers saw I was serious they cleaned the apartment like no one ever has done. I don't understand bugs, they make my skin crawl .... Good god I can never invite anyone to TFP!!!

[ratbastid]

I stayed in a crap-shack the summer between my junior and senior years of college. It was a one-bedroom I was sharing with two insane women. They slept in the bedroom, and I lived on the futon in the living room.

The window above my bed had a pane of glass missing, and the landlord couldn't be bothered to fix it. That was okay, because it was Minnesota in the summer, and so roughly a billion degrees. But outside that window was the building's dumpsters, which meant that on Tuesday mornings, the truck would come and slam me awake at like 6:00, and on every other day it smelled like trash.

These women were no prize either. Complete slobs, both of them. And I'm messy, but this was ridiculous. One of them bleached her hair in the bathtub, and left a film of super-slippery bleach residue in the tub. I got in there and slipped all over the place, ended up cutting the front of my big toe on the popped-up drain plug cover... and got bleach in the cut. Bleeding and screaming in my garbage-scented apartment at 6 in the morning. Not one of my better looks.

Also, there was an old man who lived down the hall who was scary. He hung out all day on the porch of a nearby shop, wearing a blue seersucker suit and straw hat, dapper as hell. In the evening, he sat in his apartment with the door wide open, in his tighty whities. This apartment smelled like utter death. There was something dead and rotting in there, and this mostly-naked 80-year-old man. You had to hold your breath and close your eyes and go past really fast.

When lurky and I got married, we moved into what seemed at first to be a decent one-bedroom apartment. What we didn't know was, the downstairs neighbors were into rap, and had parties every night. There was a murder two buildings down the night we moved out. We were VERY glad to get out of there.

[PonyPotato]

Originally Posted by Xerxys

Pony What the hell???? The instant I saw roaches in my apartment I threatend to break the lease. It was gonna cost me $800 and when the fuckers saw I was serious they cleaned the apartment like no one ever has done. I don't understand bugs, they make my skin crawl .... Good god I can never invite anyone to TFP!!!

My landlord pays for quarterly exterminator treatments for my apartment.

The problem for me is the number of these specific beetles - mealworm beetles - that have invaded my apartment this year when last year they were only in the barn. I flushed a dozen of them in 24 hours a week ago. I'm hoping they don't come back.

[thingstodo]

Oh, this makes me feel so good and also brings back memories. I, too, lived in shitty aprtments years ago. Trailers, too. The was around 30 years ago. Things got progressivly better so hang in there.

I now live in a 2,700 sg ft ranch with 1,500 sq ft of finished based with a bar and full sized pool table and a walkout. My wife has a yoga studio in the basement. We live on one acres lots on a dead end street with 15 other homes. Fortunately, my side of the street back up to a large tree farm with several rows of spruce trees in between. The deck is about 1,000 sq ft and partially covered. It is way too much house but we gave up a house with a pool on a lake in SFLA so we were looking for a peaceful place. The size is great in the winter.

It took a long time to get here and I appreciate it all the more when I am reminded of the past!

I do have to say that dlish sure has a nice setup!

[noodle]

I went from a 1390 sqare foot condo at the beach to a quarter of an old home. The front stairs are cracked and tilted.
The mosquitos greet you in the hallway and glue themselves to the door until you open it, then they come in.
I have three window units that make a hell of a lot of noise.
No heat right now, they swear there's a furnace going in closer to winter.
The dining room/kitchen is a step down that was built on top of a screen porch, the actual cooking area is added on to that.
You can lean up against a wall while washing dishes.
There are no more than two sets of plugs in any room.
There are window units in each room. Yeah. Where to plug in the alarm clock?
I have four cabinets. Four. Under the sink. Not sure where to put food.
There's roach dirt in them there cabinets. And one was rotted out from a leak.
They "fixed" it with a piece of plywood.
My internet download speed averages 76kbs. Shazaaaam!
The ceiling in the cooking area is about 8 inches higher than the top of my head.
The bedroom is fairly big, but there are two plugs. And a giant arch in the middle of the floor.
So sleeping on my bed is kinda like being on an air mattress, trying not to roll.
The aqua tub and sink are kinda cool, but the tub takes 35 minutes to fill up enough to soak because of water pressure. So it's fairly chilly by the time the water stops.
There's dirt everywhere and I sweep daily.
It does have hardwood floors in the living room and bedroom which are part of the original building and there's a gas stove and hot water heater. It has potential, but I'm looking very, very hard. There's little counterspace for cooking and zero storage.
sigh

it'll get better. then I'll post up pictures. I can walk to three excellent sushi houses, the best falafel place in town, five bars, an irish pub, the gym, the grocery store and a park. On Saturdays, when I get my bike fixed, I can ride to the open-air market. But right now I'm down, so this place sucks.

[Mister Coaster]

We just downsized from a 3000 sq ft, 4 BR house (that includes basement sq ft) to a 2 BR apartment with 870 sq ft.

We had amassed so much crap in the big house that even after selling off quite a bit of furnature, it STILL didn't fit in a 28' moving truck. We got an additional trailer, and still had to leave a bunch of crap behind.

The apartment is in OK shape, but the lack of space is already getting to me. We still have boxes to unpack, and there is ALWAYS kid's stuff just laying around. We haven't had the place "clean" yet, and it's driving me ape-shit, but most of that is our fault.

The dishwasher didn't work at all, in fact dishes came out of it dirtier than when they went in. We did complain and get a new one quickly (OMG) but the installer put it in wrong and it flooded the kitchen and the kids' room. Turns out the installer just didn't think hooking up all of those pesky hoses was necessary. That got fixed, carpet pads torn up, replaced and dried. But all that working on the plumbing (which is bad) caused another leak from the incoming main water line. Another flood.

At least they do send the maintainence guy quickly, unfortunately they don't hire professionals to do the work, just one poor underpaid schlubb.

[Bear Cub]

Smells like curry, not by my choice.

Speed bumps from hell in the parking lot.

For everything else, see the "appliances you hate" thread.

[Corneo]

Wow, some of these stories just sound awful.

My first apartment out of college was only 700 sq feet. Paid close to 1000/month after utilities. The reason being that my unit shared a meter with 2 other units. We would divide the cost of electricity among 3 units. One of the tenants in the other apartment always left the A.C on during the summer. My living room was too small to have any furniture, hence I never had any guests come over.

[squeeeb]

Originally Posted by Corneo

Wow, some of these stories just sound awful.

My first apartment out of college was only 700 sq feet. Paid close to 1000/month after utilities. The reason being that my unit shared a meter with 2 other units. We would divide the cost of electricity among 3 units. One of the tenants in the other apartment always left the A.C on during the summer. My living room was too small to have any furniture, hence I never had any guests come over.

1000/month for 700 sq feet?????? where the hell was that? san fran? london? tokyo?

[Corneo]

Maybe it was close to 800 sq feet, but yes this was in the San Francisco area.

[Shaindra]

Wow. I haven't done bad at all. My first apartment in college was 600sf for $285/month, but it didn't suck. 70s era building, but no bugs or shootings. Yeah, I'm dating myself there. CT was 700sf for $700/month. Then we bought the 1000sf condo for $1000/month. Now in a 4 bed colonial on 3 acres in the woods. I don't have the heart to tell you how much blood money I'm paying for this, but I do love the skinny-dipping privacy. Neighbors are so overrated.

[DaniGirl]

Well I live in really crappy apartments where the maintenance workers suck ( they live right above us too, and vacuum almost every night after midnight) and cant fix anything. Also we keep getting notices complaining about beer cans and cigeret buds, we don't drink beer and we don't smoke. Its the fucking maintenance workers that live above us.

Ok well back to my fucking falling apart apartment. All the doors are falling apart and have holes in them like someone punched holes in them. We have no doors on our closets. And the carpet is really bad. We also have mold issues in our bedrooms and bathroom.

Well I guess that is life, this is what we can afford, oh ya did I mention the apartment came with a bum. Just joking Punk.of.Ages