Your apartment and requisite fucking useless super, aloof landlord, and bullshit structural problems.

all good things to keep in mind.
i wouldn't need a security deposit, i would be moving in with that special someone (TMI?)

i think sending the rent & letter is good idea this month. nezt month if they haven't fixed it, fuck em.

my only worry with that is that next month is still three week away--that's three weeks of waiting for them to fix this shit.

lol so basically ian just lookin for an excuse to get out of his lease early ;)

(p.s. i have photographic evidence of the leak's progress and how the hole was enlarged rather than fixed by the super today. if i were feeling more vicious, i would have taken a picture of the wet slab of plaster that was stuck to my shirley collins record this morning. see people, this is why i keep my records in plastic sleeves.)

tza, fuck off.

don't landlords need to give you a certain window to move out when they evict? if so, you could withhold rent this month and see if that fixes the problem. if they try to evict you for it (though they probably won't if it's the 1st time), at least you've still got the safety window?

i playin, ian.

My landlord is so freakishly good at what he does that all I can complain about is how ON THE SPOT and THOUGHTFUL he is. For example: there's currently a ladder out in the hallway because the cleaning lady is washing the blinds and windows from the inside. Landlord attached a note to the ladder that says "I apologize for leaving this ladder in the hallway (then goes on to explain why it's there)...if anyone finds it unsightly, or if you bring company over and they complain, or if you fear that you will trip over it, please let me know and I will remove it at once."

Last week, when the street-sweepers started up again, he attached a note to the front door that said: "Street-sweeping starts this week! Check where your car is parked - you don't want to get a ticket!"

Freak.

you just don't get that kind of treatment here in the big apple.

wow. nicest. landlord. ever.

Send a certified letter, then follow these

felicity seriously, thank you for being helpful. i appreciate it.

no prob

it's a shame, because i really like my apartment! it's nice and big and has huge windows! and it's affordable. but, this shit is driving me nuts. just the drip drip drip wakes me up in the night.

ian, if you don't have me on killfile, talk to Joe Fullman

i love your apartment, ian! that really is a shame :(

(the better me overrode the temptation to post "deal")

deal is the new stfu.

ian and the requisite, fucking, useless, super, aloof, landlord

C-, doesn't show expected effort.

Someone's not going to be posting to I Love Baseball any time soon.

you ppl in the real cities be catty as hell

dang

this thread makes me glad i only have 3 more months of rent to pay on my current place. i like the apartment itself but i really ended up with the worst of the worst w/r/t neighbors. (right now it's 10pm, i have a migraine, and the guy next door is blasting nonstop four-on-the-floor-kickdrum oonce-oonce.)

no way to short the power in the basement?

i am that neighbor

i actually shorted out my downstairs neighbor's power once but it was because i accidentally blew out a cheap power strip -- that neighbor was also playing loud repetitive music that he said was to keep his dog quiet. hmm.

We have squirrels that live in the walls, and sometimes they come into the kitchen and tear shit up.

We also had bats that lived in the attic. When it got really hot last summer, they moved out and left behind BAT BUGS, which, functionally, are bed bugs. Nothing makes a landlord move faster than the words 'bed bugs'.

I have also cut the power to annoying loser wannabe DJ's apartment.

Nothing makes a landlord move faster than the words 'bed bugs'.
haha not in nyc!

at christmas my landlady's useless son puts an inflatable carousel with a penguin riding a reindeer in our front yard

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/117/313620868_4359ccec0d.jpg

my landladies and their super are generally pretty awesome but I'm glad I know how to fix locks, spackle walls and install air conditioners on my own without any help. and they weren't any help at all when they upgraded to HD and the installers cut my line in the process, but in the end it worked out, I'm saving money this way and not really missing anything.

spackling is so easy once you know what quickset to use

a penguin riding a reindeer

!!!

spackling is so easy period

do you guys know what made 3M the company it is today? waterproof sandpaper. truth bomb.

i'm all about caulking. i love a hard caulk.

it was those fucking magic highlighters man & u kno it xp

i am thinking of recaulking my shower bc my landlady/super certainly aint nevah gonna do it, even though it was poorly done to begin w/ and is disintegrating.

the window ledge in my shower is made of wood and is rotting through -- i've been caulking it up tho admittedly that's like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound.

my shower has caulk in places that should have been grouted.

luckily, no problems here except landlady's infant and toddlers upstairs (her when I moved in: "You won't hear a thing," hahaha, it's like a fucking bowling alley plus crying up there)

..all over my Carly Simon's Greatest Hits LP.

can end any sentence.

mookieproof, you must live across the street from my friend's place (in cgardens). when we were there for an xmas party last year, everyone marveled at the lawn display.

i left my apt this morning to find a bottle of wine from my landlord with a note thanking us for being such good tenants. I think we were such good tenants because we told her that our sink was leaking.
weird, but nice.

i hope your apartment probs get sorted out, ian!
is there some kind of form landlords fill out when they become landlords that requires an cheap-with-sociopathic-tendencies identity check?

yesterday i was talking to my bldg manager/super b/c it's lease-renewal time and was talking about my crappy old fridge and what to do to get a new one. and anyway, that should work out, but anyway, i guess b/c she is also sort of my friend, we started talking about whether i wanted to move to another apartment in the bldg and i was like, well, are there any 2-bdrms and she said nooo, mostly they are 'lofts' lol bachelor apartments. mine is a 1-bdrm and my rent is kinda criminal b/c of passing down of lease years ago from friend. anyway, so she showed me a couple of the newly renovated apartments in the bldg that were like really small hotel rooms! and the rent on them was more than my place!

i feel like i live in a freakin palace now. with a crappy fridge.
lol perspective

Everyplace I move into the oven is broken, it's like the previous tenants never used it, or at least didn't care about what temperature it was at.

Current one thermostat is broken so oven just keeps getting hotter.

ohyeah my oven is also not working but stove is fine
they replaced top & bottom elements and fuses but obv it's an electrical problem - they're like here's a can of cleaner, try that, we'll see
i have been too lazy/busy to try that but whatever i'm too lazy/busy to have use for the oven on a regular basis anyway!

i've patched and spackled a lot of shit in my day, but the hole in ian's ceiling is in need of a professional's help.

my neighbor likes to blast music really loudly at like 8 am - and she only ever listens to that mary j blige song and "no one" by alicia keys. but i've lived with so much worse.

and this morning i found a monster cockroach on my floor, dead thankfully. i think my cat killed it! go cat!

most of the roaches i've had have been smaller, and they mostly got killed off by an earlier spraying. they are renovating a bunch of disgusting buildings on my block though, so i hope it's just that and not indicative of monster cockroaches everywhere.

Roxy, I imagined that post in a Wednesday Addams voice. Nice work.

i've seen this work: you put a dollop of gel near where the nest is, then the parent roach bites off a little gel, brings it back to the nest, bites off some more & brings it back to the nest, lather rinse repeat and soon everyone's DEAD.

The best stuff is the stuff where it kills other roaches that cannibalize the dead ones.

Roxy, I imagined that post in a Wednesday Addams voice. Nice work.

-- suzy, Tuesday, April 8, 2008 1:23 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Suz: when I was a kid, everyone told me I looked just like Wednesday Adams. Sometimes I still get it!

someone should remake cannibal holocaust with roaches.

Paella has vodka in it?

My roommate caulked our bathtub, and now the water runs outside the tub. :(

My main issue with our apartment is the man who lives below me who has the coughing disease. I've bought earplugs but I haven't put used them yet.

Otherwise, our landlord seems pretty no-nonsense, and is the only landlord I've ever heard of to not raise the rent at lease renewal time.

any landlord who doesn't automatically raise the rent is a keeper IMHO.

aww ian's in love

don't get smart, boy.

I am a landlord, but I live with my tenants as roommates and they are long term friends. This prevents most problems from going on for too long. Right now I am replacing the third component in our gas oven, hopefully the damn thing will work now or I'm out $250.

I also work for a property management company fixing stuff like the things described in this thread, and it always makes me mad to read stories like these about landlords not caring. We get on that shit fast! Then again Oregon has fairly strong renter's rights laws, so our choices are limited.

Ian if I lived in NYC I would come put up a 4x4 piece of drywall or whatever. Definitely take felicity's advice.

Check out tenant.net if you're in nyc, there's a lot of very serious tenants' rights people on there. Be very careful about doing anything that might make your landlord even think about starting any kind of court case against you, as that can lead to you being blacklisted in perpetuity thanks to the shitty tenant screening background check companies that all LL's use. These companies basically report that a court case was filed against you but never say that it was dismissed, or thrown out...or 100% based on the LL's shameful slum lord ways. This can haunt you forever and even get you rejected by a co-op board (happened to me).

we're raising our renter's rent $50 for the first time in 3 years.

So last night my neighbor called me into his apartment to tell me that he saw the super take mail (supposedly, my netflix) out of my mail box. My building was just bought by a new company. I'm really fucking sick of my netflix going missing but no one wants to earn the wrath of their super. Any thoughts?

call the cops or talk to your super, or talk to the management company

I think I want to call the cops because this is the management company: http://www.brownstoner.com/brownstoner/archives/2008/02/tenants_charge.php

j0n l3wis, my neighbor and sometime ilxor called about stuff any they didn't reply

Is it worth calling the USPS? Do they send in Kevin Costner and levy 50,000 fines

there was a dead bird in my bathroom this morning. it wasn't there last night. i have no idea how it got in or how long it had been staying with me. fucker owes me rent.

Call the Chicago bird morgue:

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c7/amypetlover/Hawk.jpg

or you could just rent from Kim's, jw.

Mr Kim is an evil man. Did you ever see that movie he was involved in?

THREAD FOR THE DEAD DEAD BIRD

jon - that's fucked! i'd have the cops on him so fast!
but then again i don't have to deal with - what i'm learning are - NY's shitty renters rights.

Well mostly I don't want to be targeted for anything

my landlord called me today and seemed really upset at the tone of my letter, particularly that i called his secretary rude. on the bright side: leak upstairs fixed, hopefully ceiling fixed tomorrow!

my landlord got busted today for growing 450+ w33d plants

wau

he hook you up ever?

daaaaaaaaamn.

my landlord is still a cunt btw.
sanndy nager, you are a cunt.

apparently someone left a note on our building's trash bin that warns of "maggots, rodents, and flies." we share this bin (okay, "dumpster," although i hate that word) with the building next door. it's that building's bin, technically. we share a common area in the back where people park, do laundry, dispose of their trash. we've just learned that our landlord and the next-door landlord *hate* each other, so there's "nothing" our property management office can do about the pest situation, other than maybe put down a couple traps.

i am overcome with lassitude.

i have a question for folks.

per agreement with the landlord, we use the attic of our building (it's a two-flat) for storage. years ago, there was a rodent problem and they left droppings all over our stored boxes, etc. we alerted the landlords, who set some traps but otherwise didn't offer to clean up the droppings (which are truly disgusting and everywhere).

flash forward years later (today), i'm preparing to move, and went to the attic to retrieve some boxes. the droppings problem has become much worse. boxes i had brought up to the attic long after the landlords had set the traps are now littered with droppings.

everything i've read suggests that these droppings can be a major health hazard, esp. when you're trying to clean them up. for that reason it seems like the kind of thing that ought to be done by a professional. however our landlords are both extremely stingy and very unpleasant (when they want to be). so i'm reluctant to approach them to ask if they can have the attic properly cleaned.

so what should we do? undertake the clean off that section of the attic with our things (the attic as a whole is much larger) ourselves? if so, how? should we rent a dumpster to get rid of stuff (no way will it fit in the little garbage bins our landlord provides us)? if there's a box with some droppings on it, can we clean it with disenfectant and still use it? or should be just trash everything that's come into contact w/ feces?

any advice is welcomed and will be much appreciated.

...

We don't have a general "death to landlords" thread.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/dsa-comes-for-immigrant-landlords-of-color

The boiler in the 14-unit building he owns in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood had gone belly up a few months before, and supply chain issues were making it impossible to find a good replacement. It was getting cold in New York, so Eccles bought each of his tenants a space heater before shelling out a small fortune on heat pumps, a green solution he said he liked in large part because it was good for the environment. The investment meant he was now nearly $300,000 in debt. And New York, he said, was doing everything it could to drive him out of business.

Very generous of him to buy 14 $50 space heaters for a New York winter.

Eccles, who moved to Brooklyn from Jamaica as an infant and whose family owes its break to his uncle Walter, who climbed his way up from fruit picker to owner of more than 100 multiunit properties.

Funny that the media can only find *one* guy to cover over and over and over out of what, 8.8 million people in NYC? https://t.co/f2zxxAvXz2 pic.twitter.com/UC8ByQqrag

— Lindsay Ballant (@lindsayballant) March 25, 2022

well pic.twitter.com/sBHXyzGKDk

— Rebecca Baird-Remba (@thecitywanderer) April 18, 2022

we had an obvious leak in the wall as we could hear it. the maintenance crew was prompt, but gave us no real warning (we think they told it to my dad, who by now they know can't talk, as they've met him many times over the last two years).....promptly made so much noise I had to bail on my training class and the neighbor next door came out agitated.

after that, we noticed our bathroom floor was wet, like water seeping through. we got told it was the toilet, they just needed to reseal the caulk.

that's done....wet floors remain. then they look at the toilet and say they found a crack in the bowl, install a new one. floors remain wet.

then maintenance tries to come over and tell us we're obviously not toweling ourselves off after our showers, which.....what? how would that produce water on the floor 12 hours after anybody took a shower, and besides it's not true. so he relented, said it looked like a drainage issue, and added putty.

water...still...coming through floor. they look today and find a leak in the SHOWER and have to come and fucking tear shit apart tomorrow, so now I have to go to the office to work as I have a class.

to their credit, they're prompt and polite, but this has been incredibly disruptive for the last two months.

I spent the day putting plastic on the windows and weatherproofing all the cracks; like every Chicago apartment I’ve lived in, the windows were either installed improperly or have become warped over the decades. Half of our windows don’t really lock, because the bit you turn is a few centimeters higher than where it turns into. As you can imagine, that creates a lot of drafts. Likewise, our porch door is visibly crooked in the frame.

It made me more frustrated than usual this year, because it really summed up how normalized it is that landlords aren’t expected to do anything more than the bare minimum, barring some emergency like a leak. (Or unless they plan to call it a rehab and jack up the rent.) Oh, it’s just an old building, tenants should expect discomfort, that’s just the way it goes.

Sure, it’s not their fault—the management company didn’t install these windows. Somehow, though, that translates into not being their responsibility. Rather than landlords fixing the windows somewhere along the line, the tenants just have to spend their own time and money to weatherproof, or pay higher heating bills as a result of the building’s defect. They could at least send someone around to seal the windows for us.

It’s similar to air conditioning. If the building doesn’t have it, it’s the tenants’ responsibility to buy an window unit and drag it along to every place they rent—because that’s just the way the old building is, and heaven forbid the landlord shell some money out for a one-time solution.

It’s a topsy turvy world: in most other businesses, if you pay thousands of dollars to a company, they’d treat you like a valuable client and do what they can to make you happy. In renting, the landlord acts more like they’re your boss—don’t complain too much, or submit too many maintenance requests, else they might get irritated and decide you’re too much trouble to retain.

My landlord isn't so terrible, but I do feel like a lot of chores are up to me.. currently doing some caulking replacement around the tub

When my bathroom ceiling fell in due to an upstairs leak, they were kind enough to replace it

I have a small towel that I cram into the front door crack at night, using a plastic scraper. But this is coastal california, not Chicago, so the stakes are much lower. I think this building is around a hundred years old, and it has separate taps for hot & cold water in the bathroom sink, which kinda sucks. Pretty sure the toilet is from the 40's or so, but it seems to work okay.