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

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.

did i tell you guys about the time a few years ago, dif apartment, my kitchen ceiling had a bubble form and expand in it and then a few days later half the ceiling collapsed/fell down because the upstairs neighbours had a long-time washing machine leak? IT WAS GROSS and then the landlord's henchmen came in a few days later and tore out all the rotted wood etc and put it in a few garbage bags in the backyard and then basically did this elaborate spackle job that of course never got painted over

bugs are still the worst tho and i hope they never happen to me fingers all crossed

bats are the worst

snakes are the best

I lived in a place once, there was a **massive** hole in the ceiling of my bedroom from a leaky bathtub that NEVER got fixed. Nine, ten months later I got a subleaser, moved out. Two months after that I get a call from my landlord. Everyone in my old place, subleaser included, DISAPPEARED owing several $thousand in back rent. He took me to court. I paid their debt. There's actually an interest story about how I tracked down one of the absconded former roommates and cut the amount I paid in half. But I'm about to fall asleep. Another time maybe.

(Note. Took a few years to pay off because I worked as a dishwasher for Old Country Buffet at the time. How. Miserable.
P.S. I love bats and snakes.)

"interesting"

a friend of mine had to beat one to death with a broom once & he said it shrieked & stuff. :(

good thing theyre just giant bugs

mookieproof, you must live across the street from my friend's place (in cgardens)

bingo!

my kitchen ceiling had a bubble form and expand in it and then a few days later half the ceiling collapsed/fell down because the upstairs neighbours had a long-time washing machine leak it was full of thousands of baby spiders

this is what i was expecting in a urban legend stylee

Ah I'm still here...

a friend of mine had to beat one to death with a broom once & he said it shrieked & stuff. :(

One time as a kid I saw a rabbit across my back yard and thought it'd be funny to scare it (I don't know WHY). I threw a rock. If I'd been trying to hit it I would have missed by a mile, but of course I had to be aiming for a near miss. THWACK!!!

This is how I learned that rabbits SCREAM.

My leccy still out -- cannot use anything in my room that has to be plugged in, because the ONE OUTLET that I can reach with my extension cord has just gone on the fritz. I could prob reach someone else's but then their fuse would overload so that's not a solution. Landlord will do NUFFINK -- the cost of living in a crappy industrial space where you can do whatever you want is that you also have to do whatever you DON'T want.

Do I read up on wiring and try replacing outlet box myself? I fear roommates are never going to do it.

I think to myself very tiredly "I am too old for this shit" but then I remember how cheap my rent is and how much I like to go out.

No structural shit's happened to my place yet (tho there are gaps between the windows and the actual frames that you could squeeze a phone book through). I live in the middle floor of a 3-family house -- downstairs girls have yippy puntable dogs, upstairs bro (landlord's son) seemingly wears workboots and fucks like Hercules, but I've learned to tune out the dogs, and upstairs bro & I worked out our shit. The landlord actually changed a light fixture in the dining room before I moved in because I didn't like it. Two pre-installed A/Cs, washer / dryer in apt, dishwasher, electric range -- I fear that if I move into another apt, this experience will have spoiled me. I think I'm dragging my feet on bitching about the busted light in my bedroom for fear of killing the dream (and causing the bedroom wall to collapse).

My only true apt-related downer is that the mom & pop sandwich shop place @ the end of my street closed down not 2 months after I moved in -- the owner made the best fried rice, and once made me paella w/ extra vodka so I could "score with the ladies". Then, he disappeared, and the place shuttered up. I bought a steak sub UNDER NEW OWNERSHIP and got violently sick. RIP fried rice bro.

I've done plumbing, walls, painting and wood work.

Electrical is the one thing I would never try fixing myself.

should be pretty east to replace outlet box. turn off the power first tho...

This thread is reminding me that the next time my friends give me shit about buying a house and turning into a boring grown-up type, i will go on a screed about how 20 years of shitty landlords forced my hand

When I moved in to my new place 4 months ago they'd replaced the bathroom suite but didn't bother to clean the surrounding areas so eurgh bathroom gunge of complete strangers, blah.

I've got to get an electrician in to put an outlet under the counter for to plugz my new fridge/freezer.

my current landlord is trying to selectively ignore the 60 day notice clause in my lease in order to try and trick me into placing an ad to rent the apartment on my own dime or cajole one of my friends into moving in. fuck yooooooooo

i think the worst one was the place where there was a 8 inch diameter pipe to the outside that they never closed up combined with them forgetting to pay the utility bill so the heat didn't get turned on until JANUARY.

either that or the place where they refused to fix the increasingly leaking roof until we had a huge rainstorm and the leak spread into the electrical conduit, causing the fire dept to come and the city to file a lawsuit.

you haven't lived until you've woken up in the middle of the night to sirens and walked out into your hallway and seen water pouring out of the ceiling fixtures.

oh yeah we also have ants, not the cute ones with the "z" like in the movies either.

Ooh, my brother's house in CA had ants, BAD. The best way to get rid of them is/was not to leave any food out, obv, but also to use some kind of kitchen cleaner WITH BLEACH spray bottle b/c it destroys the scent trail that the other ants are following.

Bedbugs trumps all other pest problems except for rats eating your newborn child

....which is why we don't allow infants in our apt.

re roaches: this shit really works and doesn't put toxic fumes into the air the way spray does.

http://a1061.g.akamai.net/7/1061/5412/home/www.walgreens.com/dbimagecache/333595.jpg

I read that if you see one cockroach out, it means that all the other spaces are taken. Seriously.

but how do you catch the roaches to give them the giant roach destroying shot??

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

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.