Sebbylite

There came a point in my moving experience where I was taking a break, and thinking about all the shit that has happened over the last couple of days, and I didn’t understand why I wasn’t pissed off. I mean, there was definitely plenty of opportunity to get angry at all the different problems that were cropping up, but for some reason I just took it all in stride and kept a pretty even keel during the whole process (which is still going on), or at least as even a keel as I ever have.

Thinking back over it, I guess I would have to say that pretty early on in the moving process I realized that it was going to be the horror move from a bad/great 80’s movie (think Money Pit meets Pet Cemetery). After that point it became useless and self-destructive to become angry, and so I just went with it. To make you fully realize just what I’m talking about, I’ll try to recap the story as best I can (although I know that I’ll have things a little bit out of order):

This was the original plan: old tenants would move out on the 30th (Saturday), we would give the landlord Sunday the 1st to clean and make things ready for us, and then we would meet him on Monday the 2nd at 10am to get keys and start moving in. Sounds pretty simple, right? It should have been.

We showed up Monday at 10am to find that the old tenants had packed up their clothes, and some of their more valuable items, and then just left. No cleaning, no throwing away of food, no moving of extra furniture. Nothing. When we showed up, the landlord was puttering around in one of the bedrooms, vacuuming and dusting, and basically making no impact whatsoever on the cleanliness of the house. After a brief conference between the three of us who are living together, we told him to stop (1-it would have taken him a week or more at the rate he was going to actually clean the house, and 2-that is what getting a deposit is for, to pay for cleaning and damages). After a small discussion, where we offered to clean the house if he gave us the old tenants deposit, a decision was made to hire a cleaning crew for the house. It ended up taking 4 professionals about 10 hours to finish cleaning.

At this point in time, the house is mostly clean. Except for my room, which was evidently used as the neighborhood cat bath-house. And by bath-house, I mean urinal. The carpet was pretty much saturated with old urine (and the gallons of odor-covering-foam that the landlord tried to use to cover the smell). He said that if the smell didn’t go away after the odor stuff dried, he would replace the carpet.

Of course, he forgot to set a time frame on this carpet replacement. And as of Tuesday at noon, he left town for the summer. Which left me high and (not very) dry. And which is also why I spent my Fourth of July (go America!) ripping up carpet, taking out carpet pad soaked with urine, and cleaning the floors underneath. Then, because it still smelled like a port-o-john on a warm day, I drenched it with enzymatic cat-urine killer.

Which almost worked. After letting it sit for 24 hours, it only smelled a little, so I poured on another coating and we’ll see how it smells then.

I’m back. The above was written last Wednesday. It is now Tuesday, and I’m going to continue the story.

Alright, where was I? Oh yeah, the cat piss. It turns out that the urine-off was pretty damn good stuff, and my room doesn’t smell at all anymore, which makes me happy.

Well, almost makes me happy, because we still have no hot water. Did I not mention that? My bad. We haven’t had hot water since last Tuesday. Yeah, as in 7 days ago. Which means I either stink pretty bad during the day, or I go over to friend’s houses and beg the use of their bathroom (which usually works, maybe because I smell so bad they actually want me to shower and are willing to put up with me using their shower to do so).

Ok, to recap: we now have a house that has no hot water, a shit-ton of stuff that isn’t ours stashed in the basement (and various pieces of furniture throughout the rest of the house), pretty much the only reason it is clean is because we have done a large share of the cleaning, and is in general dis-repair otherwise, which we would have been ok with had it been the only thing wrong with the house, but added on top of everything else it is beginning to look like the proverbial straw. Plus our landlord is a liar. He wrote us an email blatantly playing each of us off against each other, saying that one person or another had agreed to each condition that we found unacceptable. Which, when the three of us living here got together and talked it over, we determined to be complete and total BS.
Suffice to say that we are looking into other housing options, although there aren’t that many out there at this time of the month.