My apartment is a mess

[Sonicron]

"VVVWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO..."

Since this morning, that sound is my constant companion. Why? There's a drying machine in my kitchen, because I've got water damage in my apartment. Three walls and about half of the floor are soaked, and all the mold makes it smell like I'm taking a walk through the woods looking for mushrooms. Leaving aside the joys of getting my living space effectively cut in half (such as the place being in horrific disorder and everything being cramped as all hell), I'm less than thrilled about the fact that the front portion of my apartment looks like "service duct meets quarry meets Silent Hill 'icky mode'", with the wallpaper torn down, the floor ripped out and large tubes from the dryer snaking their way through several rooms.
This state of affairs is going to last at least two weeks, and then I gotta get on my landlord's ass to contact the respective companies charged with the responsibility of returning this dump to a habitable condition. Yay.

I guess this is just one of the many ways to have fun once you move out of your parents' house. So tell me, my fellow Escapists - aside from obvious stuff like bills and service appointments, what kind of crapsack nuisances have you had to deal with since you got your own place?

-Edit- Ha! 4444 posts. ^^

 

[Trivun]

Not really anything, to be honest. At the moment I'm living with my parents anyway since I've finished university and only work part-time, until I get a full-time job I can't afford my own place again. At university though, I did have to put up with messy housemates - second year, we had mice in the house, and I kept my part of the house (I had my own kitchen, living area and bathroom, in a seperate basement flat) completely clean and tidy, but we still had mice down there thanks to the girls who literally could not keep their kitchen on the ground floor clean. I could barely go in there with the smell and the mess they made. Third year was better, I was living with two girls in a three-bedroom flat and they were pretty tidy, the worst we had then was when the bathroom lightbulb blew and I had to replace it. But I will never forget the pigsty I had to suffer for most of second year with my housemates at the time. Great people, and I'm happy to call them my friends, but even so...

 

[similar.squirrel]

Lived in a pretty badly-insulated house last year, which meant that condensation would run down the walls of my room in the morning if I had a girl over. Other than that, no real problems. Moving out again, and this new place seems much nicer. Housemates had better be tidy, though.

 

[trollnystan]

Er... bad wallpaper?

Reading your list of horrors I realise I've been incredibly lucky with all my living arrangements. The worst I lived in was maybe the youth home (aged 16) or the house I shared with some friends (aged 22); they both had a few mice in the walls and structural problems, like shoddy foundations, nothing dreadful. Maybe a smidgeon of mold.

Thank you for making me suddenly grateful for my horribly brown linoleum walls and floor and badly placed showerhead in my bathroom, the big dent in the wall in my living room (made by previous tenant), and my damaged floor.

Hope you get that shit fixed ASAP. *fingers crossed hoping*

 

[StormShaun]

None...yet.

I tend to move out sometime in my life with my best friend so that will be the biggest bump in the road.

 

[Vault101]

I have a thing with dishes.....they just pile up, I work full time so I cant be effed cleaning on weekdays

and keep my place pretty clean though, and the walls covered in posters


EDIT: because this place has TERRIBLE colurs, there was a hole in the bathroom roof that gradually got bigger..but its fixed now, there are cracks and a few insects (and the dust...THE DUST where the hell does it all come from?) oh and no fan in the kitchen so it turns into a smokehouse when I cook

anyway its ok Ill be moving in a bit...bad news is ill have somone to live with

 

[Sonicron]

Er... bad wallpaper?

Reading your list of horrors I realise I've been incredibly lucky with all my living arrangements. The worst I lived in was maybe the youth home (aged 16) or the house I shared with some friends (aged 22); they both had a few mice in the walls and structural problems, like shoddy foundations, nothing dreadful. Maybe a smidgeon of mold.

Thank you for making me suddenly grateful for my horribly brown linoleum walls and floor and badly placed showerhead in my bathroom, the big dent in the wall in my living room (made by previous tenant), and my damaged floor.

Hope you get that shit fixed ASAP. *fingers crossed hoping*

Oh, I'll get it fixed alright, but even ASAP is incredibly slow. I've had that damn damage since the beginning of last month, and after about 5 letters and a bazillion phone calls they've managed to get the dryers here four weeks later. There go my holidays.

At least I'll get what I'm due. Just contacted the local tenant union and made an appointment; once the papers get signed they'll see to it I'm compensated for this... unfortunate stretch of time. No way am I paying full rent until this shit is sorted out.

 

[SckizoBoy]

-Edit- Ha! 4444 posts. ^^

If only you were Chinese, then you'd get the ultimate irony of that post-count. Culturally, '4' is the unlucky number. And that your post-count is '4 4's' would make any superstitious Chinese running for the hills.

Anyway, about a month after I moved into my current flat, it flooded out when one of the pipes cracked (it was winter) 'cos it was placed very haphazardly. Ended up talking to the plumber about CERN and the student riots. That was interesting...

 

[RobCoxxy]

The boiler in my student house broke and leaked everywhere. Not affecting the top floor but somehow entirely seeping into my ground floor room and RUINING MY SHIT.

 

[Superior Mind]

My flatmates piss me the fuck off. I don't mind that they've dominated the, (small,) place with their stuff and their stuff alone but I do mind that they never fucking tidy any of it up. I do mind that they never ever do their dishes, (I do their dishes more than they do because it reaches such a mess that I literally have no other option.) I do mind that one of them turns on a multitude of torrents for stupid TV shows before he goes to bed so if I want to use the Internet for anything I'm left with slow-as-Hell speed - which also mean he sucks up our bandwidth limit. I do care that they never ever take out the garbage, particularly as 90% of it would be theirs and particularly because if someone, (me,) doesn't take it out their kitten tears the bag to pieces and starts playing with it. Lastly I do care that they got a fucking kitten! We live in a very small inner-city place, the cat isn't allowed outside so it has way too much energy, stinks up the place, tears the crap out of the furniture and bits of paper and throws it about the place and destroys my stuff. And the fucking thing has attached itself to me because a week after they got it, (they're a couple by the way,) they left it with me for over a week so they could go skiing or some shit. And they go away quite a bit too meaning the bloody thing is more mine than it is theirs - and I'm pretty sure I've developed an allergy to cats because of it.

The dude got back from another ski trip last Sunday, he got his brother to come in and feed that cat because I said I mightn't be there. He said in conversation, "yeah I don't really like getting someone else int to take care of her, they don't care for her the way we would."

***** you leave the bloody thing alone with nothing to do in a tiny apartment every other fucking weekend, you clearly don't give a fuck about it whether you know it or not.

It's not a bad place to live overall but the flatmates really need to pick up their game or one day I'll go fucking mental and destroy the place.

 

[Skorpyo]

Roaches. BAD roaches.

They aren't even timid as you would expect regular cockroaches to be. One night I was sitting at my desk playing ME2 and one came out from under my comp. and started drinking condensation off of my glass of Jack & Coke. While I was holding it.

I crushed it with the glass.

I've spread an ungodly number of poison tabs around the apartment in order to try and kill them all off, but the little bastards just won't die. They can't even get into my food, but SOMETHING is keeping them alive.

Besides that, it's just the regular stuff. The building is sinking slowly, so the floor sags, the walls have a few cracks that have bee (noticeably) covered, and the plumbing doesn't always drain out.

 

[mikey7339]

"VVVWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO..."

Since this morning, that sound is my constant companion. Why? There's a drying machine in my kitchen, because I've got water damage in my apartment. Three walls and about half of the floor are soaked, and all the mold makes it smell like I'm taking a walk through the woods looking for mushrooms. Leaving aside the joys of getting my living space effectively cut in half (such as the place being in horrific disorder and everything being cramped as all hell), I'm less than thrilled about the fact that the front portion of my apartment looks like "service duct meets quarry meets Silent Hill 'icky mode'", with the wallpaper torn down, the floor ripped out and large tubes from the dryer snaking their way through several rooms.
This state of affairs is going to last at least two weeks, and then I gotta get on my landlord's ass to contact the respective companies charged with the responsibility of returning this dump to a habitable condition. Yay.

I had the EXACT same thing happen to me in my first apartment. The sewer lines were clogged with roots and a company was contracted to flush them out, but never did. So one morning I come home to find the laundry room completely flooded and the carpet in every room soaked with sewage water. Instead of getting all the carpet and pad out and replaced as soon as the water receded, our wonderful landlord decided just putting some blow dryers in would work. This did absolutely nothing and the place was uninhabitable for almost a week because of the mold.

OP it sounds like whoever you are renting from is trying to pull the same crap they did with me. That mold smell is NEVER going to go away unless all of the carpet is replaced and you are more than likely going to get respiratory problems if you keep living there.

After that 'incident' I was dead set on owning my own place so I could make sure anything that happens to it is taken care of proper. And so far that includes: Numerous gas leaks, furnace going out, water heater needing replaced, god knows how many water shutoff valves, sink, new flooring in every room for various reasons, and gutter & window issues...but hey, so far this summer has been uneventful and I haven't had anything catastrophic like the flooding happen again...

 

[EHKOS]

Well I used to live in this big old house that was pretty derelict. I had this weird roommate who always had this emo chick over and they would make the loudest sounds during sex. It leaked when it rained so I had to go and turn the power off. We lived right down the road from a paper mill and it stunk. The fart smell of steam, the hamster cage smell of wood chips. It was a dump, I thought the stairs would fall in under me.

 

[tharglet]

Nothing major gone wrong in our house. Did need to rewire it though, so there's holes in pretty much every room. Warned my partner that we'd have to rewire, but he didn't believe me until he replaced the consumer unit and the RCDs tripped

 

[Sonicron]

OP it sounds like whoever you are renting from is trying to pull the same crap they did with me. That mold smell is NEVER going to go away unless all of the carpet is replaced and you are more than likely going to get respiratory problems if you keep living there.

That thought occurred to me as well; I'll just have to see how the situation develops over the next month or two. The thing is, I love my apartment, and it's very conveniently situated.

Besides, the blowdryer's not simply standing in the middle of the room. The workers who came by today took down all the wallpaper in the afflicted area, ripped out the PVC floor, drilled six big holes into the floor and walls and then built a network of rubber piping that starts at the dryer and goes right into said holes; also, they put up several big heater panels to speed up the drying process in the walls. Once this fiasco is done with, the painters are going to use some sort of mold-killer paint as a first coat and then slap on the new wallpaper - after the new floor is put in, that is.

 

[Scarim Coral]

The only problems I had to deal with when I living in University flats (which sort of cout living by myself) was during the first year one of the tiles wall came off by the shower. The repairman fix it but he said we must not use the shower for a week. After that weeek my hair was a total mess (very greasy and look like I had a badhair day).
Other than that then second and third years were your typical roommate problems.

 

[Sonicron]

Damn... somehow I managed to tune out the annoying sound of the blowdryer for most of the day, but it's impossible to sleep with the damn thing buzzing merrily along, and it's a bit late in the day to go out and buy earplugs.

On a positive note, I just found out I've successfully concluded my Bachelor's studies. Maybe that high will carry me through the night and I won't need to sleep. Maybe... :\

 

[The Gnome King]

I guess this is just one of the many ways to have fun once you move out of your parents' house. So tell me, my fellow Escapists - aside from obvious stuff like bills and service appointments, what kind of crapsack nuisances have you had to deal with since you got your own place?

Ugh. I'm 32 so it's been a while but my wife and I once rented out a "house from Hell" with a bunch of other roommates.

We were looking to move out of the (nice) apartment we lived in, because we wanted room for our girlfriend's dog. (Poly, open marriage. Another story altogether.) Anyway, we ended up finding a house for rent so our girlfriend could move in with us, her dog... and somehow we ended up with two other roommates that wanted to live with us.

We found a 4,500 square foot house with a swimming pool in a very nice part of town close to my wife's work that we thought would be a great place... it even had a Jacuzzi tub in the basement; it was like some cool 70's "swinger pad" ...

we thought.

When we moved in, it took us less than a month to realize:

1) The house was infested with pigeons. As in, there was a FLOCK of the f'ing things living in our attic. Disgusting, disease ridden rats-with-wings and very, very hard to get rid of. Out cats were amused by them, us not so much.

2) The pool. The landlord refused to get it cleaned for several months, so during the first summer there we had a (literal) green mosquito pond in our backyard.

3) The plumbing. Or lack thereof. There was an attachment to the house that had a bathroom built onto it under a staircase. The toilet leaked. The landlord (landlady, actually) took another two months to fix the issue; which ended up causing mold and mildew and a disgusting smell to form over about 1/3 of the entire house.

4) The electrical wiring. We had an electrician come out and flat-out tell us that we were living in a tinderbox ready to go off at any time.

Suffice to say we were quite careful who we rented from in the future.

 

[pubbing]

Well I used to live in this big old house that was pretty derelict. I had this weird roommate who always had this emo chick over and they would make the loudest sounds during sex. It leaked when it rained so I had to go and turn the power off. We lived right down the road from a paper mill and it stunk. The fart smell of steam, the hamster cage smell of wood chips. It was a dump, I thought the stairs would fall in under me.

I fucking love fight club!!!!!!