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

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.