My apartment is crap

The apartments I live in are absolute crap. They look  nice from the outside, and seem so very pretty the first time you tour them. My building is right on the edge of a lake surrounded  by beautiful trees and is not at all crowded by stores or streets or hobos, which is kind of hard to find in the city. However, having been here for 3 years now, I can tell you with no small amount of certainty, that these apartments are crap. Actually, it’s more the management of these apartments are crap. Let me explain.

It all started in October of 2007. I was newly married, very pregnant, and was quite sick of being homeless and forced to live with my grandmother who lived 3 hours south of where my husband was forced to live because he had a job and couldn’t leave the cities. At first this setup had seemed pretty awesome. I got to spend a lot of time with my grandmother, whom I adore and don’t see often because, as previously stated, she lives 3 hours south of the cities. But as the weeks which were supposed to be days passed, and I grew progressively more pregnant, I became extremely distressed at being separated from my shiny new husband and forced to sleep with my hybrid dog on a futon in the porch.

So we decided to rent these lovely new apartments that seemed so amazingly more fancy than our first apartment, which had been decidedly ghetto and tiny. We moved in shortly after, and that’s when I began to notice that things were not quite right. First, I ventured out onto our 18 foot-long deck, marveling at how much more rich I felt because I had a mother-fucking DECK, and not just a tiny little balcony, or, even worse, no outdoor space at all, as had been the case with our first apartment. I quickly realized that my deck was not as amazing as it had first seemed. It was not, in fact, shiny and beautiful, but made entirely of unsealed wooden planks which I’m sure were salvaged from an 1820s shipwreck somewhere off the coast of Bermuda, and were not protected from the rain or snow in any way whatsoever, and had, therefore, begun to rot. The nails holding my salvaged planks together were rusty and sticking a few inches further in the air than I’m assuming is safe, and didn’t at all help to stop the rotting wood from sagging a good three inches downward when stepped upon.

Still, I enjoyed my new two-bedroom apartment, especially as I began frantically buying things to decorate the baby’s room. After a while, I began to notice that the brand new paint on the frame of my sliding door which led to the rotting death-deck was peeling to reveal the black metal underneath. I didn’t really mind, and ignored it. Soon, however, I realized that the paint was peeling at an alarming rate, despite the fact that I never found any paint shavings on the carpet or anywhere else, so I decided to investigate. Turns out it wasn’t paint peeling to reveal black metal at all. It was mold. Growing around my door. In the wintertime. Mildly disgusted, I scrubbed at the mold for a whole two hours before abandoning the obviously impossible task, until I got the brilliant idea that perhaps using bleach on it would make it go away. It did. I also learned that I am allergic to bleach.

That winter was pretty mild, considering I live in Minnesota, and we are known mostly for lakes and snow, but that did not stop the death-deck’s sliding door from developing condensation inside the glass, as well as gradually forming a buildup of ice inside the apartment which froze the door shut and was there all season because our heat does not work. This little ice-formation was nothing, however, compared to the death-cicles outside, which every winter hang directly over the door and come crashing down in a death-inducing avalanche of sharp water the second the weatherman wakes up and thinks "It might be warmer today than yesterday."

Spring arrives, and I am glad because now I can open my windows again. Unfortunately that also means that the snow is melting, and apparently our bedroom window likes to leak directly over an electrical outlet. The mold is back, only worse than before, and since it is spring, the silverfish that live in my bathroom and bedroom closet and apparently UNDER MY FUCKING BED decided to come out in full force and cause me to have a nervous breakdown because I have an anxiety disorder and bugs freak the shit out of me.

When I finally get around to approaching the office about my issues with the apartment, which takes a while because I hate any kind of confrontation and also I am lazy, they tell me that they can’t really help with the deck because they don’t have the money to do repairs on everyone’s decks and I don’t believe them because I pay $935 a month for this crap-hole, as do the billion other people who live in this massive complex, but whatever. They say they’ll send someone out to look at the mold, but if they did I never saw them and apparently they felt that the amount of mold on my walls was perfectly acceptable and didn’t need to be addressed presently.

I learn after the first thunderstorm that the slab of concrete in front of our door transforms into the Atlantic Ocean when it rains, and also that the lights over the door attract an ungodly amount of moths/mosquitoes/flying-buzzy-insects-of-doom as soon as the sun sets, and if you wish to leave the building after dark you have to hold your breath and duck through this cloud of nastiness, waving your arms like a madperson and hoping none of the bite-y ones get stuck in your hair.

Also there are no parking spaces after dark. You leave, you run the risk of having to park on the street and walking 57 miles back to the building. Actually it’s probably about a block, but it seems much further when it’s cold and dark and you’re afraid of the dark and every rustling leaf is obviously a zombie or the Jeepers-Creepers guy swooping down to carry you away into the night sky and kill you for your eyeballs.

There’s also the fact that our garage seems to be a halfway house for crack-addicted spiders, and the fact that there is a butt-shaped hole in the wall of the hallway caused by my husband’s butt going through the sheet rock while were wrestling. Long story. (Actually, it’s not, I just don’t feel like explaining it right now.) Also our kitchen isn’t big enough for one person to cook/breathe in, let alone two, but our bathroom is big, despite the silverfish infestation.

So, like I said, the apartments I live in are absolute crap. But hey, at least we have a pool! Filled with liquid ice. And possibly sharks. With lasers.