Apartment living...not for the faint of heart.

I bet many of you live in apartments. Some crappier than others. I know there are some New York City apartments that are suitable for the wealthy and pampered but, most apartments across the US are for the broke and desperate. That's the only reason why most people live in them, including me. What bothers you about apartment living?

I'll start. I've lived in apartments for the past 20 years. My current place is one of the worst. Let's see,

•not enough washers/ dryers but they always break anyway and don't work right when they are working, foul smelling/ filthy laundry room.

•Never enough hot water in the shower to shave my legs, it's always, a furious panic to clean myself before the hot water runs out.

•Neighbors having domestic disputes in the parking lot, just yesterday a guy was screaming "I'll f***in' kick your a**" to a young woman at 4 in the afternoon.

•Neighbors getting drunk and high and blasting techno music, neighbors having loud sex, so loud that it woke me up at 3 am. 

•Putrid color scheme used in the kitchen and bathroom (hello peach/ fleshtone). Kitchen tiles that look like someone held a contest to see who could make the ugliest home decor.  

•Small everything. The sink is too small to fit your hands under the faucet, and so are all the other appliances.

•Ridiculous heating system where one heat bill is divided evenly by all the apartment units. Hello, communism? 

I guess I'll stop now. How about you?  

 

Ohhhh this is fun!!!! 1. Neighbors...where do I begin?? I'm, not going to jump to conclusions on his occupation but lets just say he has people coming and going at all hours of the night. Randomly lifts weights at 4AM and enjoys dropping them loudly on the floor all while grunting and panting (keep in mind this is NOT including his loud sex) 2. Smell...I don't know what they're cooking but baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. The entire hall reeks!! 3. Heat and hot water included ...basically means, either you're freezing all night and over-heated/dehydrated during the day or the apartment smells funny from the old system. or both 4.NEVER clear the snow from the parking lot...or stairs...or driveway/walkway. and I always fall!! 5. "Beautiful" bathroom tiles, fake plastic peeling kitchen floors

Ok..now I have to go work

Let's see - drawbacks of apartment living? Neighbours... neighbours... neighbours... not to mention the complete lack of privacy and outdoor space. We've got a really good landlord who replaces stuff as soon as it breaks down, but it still gets on my last nerve to live with so many people pressed in around me! We've got the filthy too-small laundry downstairs too. They put locks on the door and gave everyone a key, but it's still disgusting :( 

I've been living on my own for almost 7 months now in an apartment and it was pretty decent until I got a new neighbor upstairs last week that walks like a damn T-Rex at all times of the day! Ugh, so I was considering saying something to her or having my fiance say something but I don't want any problems? How should I approach the situation? Should I just go directly to the office?

Ok, I feel very spoiled now.  I really have no complaints about my neighbors, or my apartments.

However, my last apartment...1. my landlady walked in whenever she wanted (always for a good cause, and trying to be helpful like delivering a package or something BUT!!) I did mention to her that it was illegal for her to do so, and some tenants might not be so understanding...

NO A/C...and it was the desert!  It was nearly 110 degrees at time in my apartment...and the heat was a joke. 

No screens on the window.

I lived about two blocks from the "hot" bar in town, so without fail I was woken up about 3 am friday and sat nights...thank goodness I worked swing, so I typically hung out at the bar in the hotel I worked at until it closed.  But those times I had to work in the morning...blah!

There was no such thing as a maintenance staff.  One night I had my faucet in the kitchen come off and they had to call the owner's son who lived two hours from there.  He didn't make it over until Monday...it broke Friday night.

All this makes me know how lucky I have it now...I live in a 2 bedroom townhouse.  We have fantastic maintenance guys, and my neighbors are great.  I hear them OCCASIONALLY (but only if I'm sleeping downstairs).  Even when I do, its cuz they just got home from the bar, but they quiet down quickly.  I really am spoiled.

Living in an apartment, for my fiancee and I, is actually pretty decent.. except, yes, for the neighbors.

I can't DDR during the week because I disturb the downstairs neighbors, and the upstairs neighbors owns a zoo, or a nursery, or both, from the sounds of it. 

In my apartment, we have our own hot water tanks per unit so I never run out of hot water.  Fortunately that's not an issue.  My problems, though?  Oh boy.

1.  It's drafty.  This place is so poorly put together that the draft coming from the front window blew out a candle that was sitting on a table three feet away from it.  Even after covering the window with plastic, re-insulating the heat-blower-outer-thingy, it's still too drafty to use the bedroom.  We're forced to sleep in our living room to stay warm since the heat-blower-outer-thingy in the living room is newer, doesn't raise the electric bill nearly as much as the bedroom one, and we can't figure out how to turn it off anyway.  It's off.  It still blows.  It's in the blue.  It still blows. 

2.  Paper-thin walls.  I'm the noisy neighbor who has wild sex all night long and listens to techno music (with headphones on!) but even when I have quiet, boring, quicky-before-a-shower-so-I-can-go-to-bed, the neighbor complains about the noise.

3.  The complaining neighbor!  I have an old lady living behind me who claims I'm jumping around in my apartment, stomping like mad, and knocking the pictures off her walls.  I'm packing woman!  I need to get into the attic and pulling down that ladder is pretty noisy.  I also have two rambunctious kitties who wander around when I'm not home.  Buy me a big, luxurious cage for them and I'll keep them caged up when I'm gone.  Otherwise, shove it.  Oh, and I'm also gimpy with a bad knee and dislocate it daily.  If I fall down and shout in pain, don't acknowledge my existance by beating on the wall.  I'm only going to beat back.

4.  Small everything.  Spacious living room and dining room, spacious bedroom, plenty of nice, large closets.. Puny kitchen and bathroom.  Forget about having two people in either one at once.  Barely one person fits.  The oven is so tiny you can't put anything higher than three inches in it.  The cabinets are so short everything has to go in turned on its side, and nothing fits in the medicine chest.  It's all sprawled out on the tiny sink space.  Two people can fit in the shower.  Two people can have sex in the shower if they work their magic.  But one person can not take a bath because these tubs are made for the little people of the world, apparently.

5.  CARPET.  I HATE CARPET!  Disgusting carpet that had iron marks and old stains on it when we moved in, that smells horrible (our pets didn't help with that), and feels gross under your socks.  Who in their right mind puts carpet in an apartment for people with pets!?  You know the animals will mess on it and even if you steam clean it, a dog will find that spot again and go. 

6.  The wall paper.  Why, oh why, have cheap wall paper in an apartment for pets?  The cats aren't declawed, they like to play, and if they see a piece of wall paper flapping in the wind, they're going to attack it and rip it off. 

7.  The colour schemes.  Egg-shell white walls.  Bright white door.  Darker-than-hell wood trim everywhere else.  Beige carpet.  It's like a friggin' forthy frappuccino in here.  You've got some weird swirl texture in the wall paper, the tiny pilled carpet on the floor, random areas are lenolium, and the you've got a cottage-cheese ceiling?  And it's not like you can hang anything on the walls to hide the gross decour and nothing you have matches the colour scheme so it all muddies together and looks out of place.

8.  The EXPENSIVE laundry room.  Three dollars for a frickin' load of laundry?!  Screw you.  I'll wait and do it at my parents house for free.


My fiance and I moved into an apartment because we were basically thrown out (long story, fight over a hair dryer) and had nowhere else to go.  At first the apartment seemed like fun, and it was fun.  But then I lost my job and now we're sick of wasting our money on rent just so we can live uncomfortably and freeze to death because the heating bill triples our electric bill every month.  Come February, I'm moving back in with my parents and we're saving up for a house.

lilborykuamami In my experience, it will just make her mad and then you'll feel all uncomfortable every time you have to brush by her in the hall.

If she's just walking, there's not really anything you can do to prevent her from walking in her apartment. Is she heavy? I bet the apartment ceiling/ floor is just cheap. I don't know what you should do, maybe complain if you are brave.

Mention something to your lessor about the noise.  Often times people don't realise how much noise they're making.  Our neighbor behind us kept her fat mouth shut for so long before finally complaining.  We had no idea how much noise we were making.

Now we do.  And we don't really give a crap.  I'm sure not all neighbors are as inconsiderate as I am, though.

Thankfully, hubby and I bought a house in May, however, before that, we lived in an apartment from hell!

1)ANTS. everywhere, all the time. we could hardly feed our cat without ants crawling all over her food.

2)Carpeting- Being charged 35$ for a carpet cleaning fee, and an additional 10$ a month for a new carpet (ummm, why do we have to clean this "new" carpet), which BTW is so old it is threadbare, and so dirty our socks turned black.

3)being charge over 400$ when we move out because THEY didn't sauter (Sp?) the pipes in the shower, which caused a slow leak we couldn't see because our dresser covered the damages. When reported, maintenece tore a hole through our bedroom into the shower (hence, we couldn't shower) and we had to go live somewhere else because they wouldn't fix it. And we had to keep paying rent. WFT?!?!?

Well, one good thing about this apartment we're in now is that it's a quiet building... but there are plenty of bad things...

• The "kitchen" and "living room" are one room. The "kitchen" is a sink, 2 cabinets, a stove, and a fridge. My counter space is about a 1.5 feet square
• Ugly, ugly, ugly mismatched outdoor carpeting in the whole place (except for the lovely linoleum in the kitchen area and bathroom, of course).
• Not enough parking spots
• A full sized WINDOW in the shower

 

I forgot to mention the lack of flea control here.

Being in a tiny apartment (700 square feet) with pets that has carpetting and you're only allowed to walk your dog in the designated field that other dogs use daily, you're bound to get fleas and ticks.  Well, when we got fleas, they got in our carpet, on our kitties, an even our guinea pig.  Poor Alex was eaten alive by them and we had no way of getting rid of them.

The lessor then told us that she has a contract with an expensive flea exterminator company and if we wanted to exterminate, we had to use them, and then clean the carpets and show proof our animals were treated by a vet.  We told her no thanks, we'll figure something else out, and suffered with the fleas for three months before finally being able to afford medicine to kill off the fleas.

They don't treat that field.  And we're not the only apartment to get bombarded with fleas. 

Oh, and if you have dog crap on your yard and you don't have proof it didn't come from your dog, you have to pay a thirty dollar fine.

Ugh.. While typing this out I managed to get ANOTHER noise violation.  I didn't even do anything today.  I'm too sick to be making a ton of noise.

Yeah, CD maybe you need to stop typing so loudly...you might want to stop breathing so loud too. ; D

I don't have too many complaints about my apartment.  We live in a low rise (three floors) on the second floor with four units per floor.  There are a lot of these building though.  The people who live above me either wear lead shoes in the house or weigh about 2 tons.  It sounds like elephants live above me.  The people below us have two dogs who bark all the time.  We have one washer and one dryer per building that all 12 units use.  It's a nice washer (front loader) but the dryer never dries the clothes all the way so I end up spending $3.20 just to dry a load.  Not to mention that a wash costs 1.60.  One building down from us there is always something going on.  The cops are always over there.  Like this morning from 3am to 6am with police dogs that were barking like a bunch of crazies.  Of course my dog had to bark at them from our bedroom because she didn't recognize the sound of the dogs.  In our apartment all utilities are included.  Plus we have a gas fireplace in the living room and tons of storage space (walk in closet too).  We’re located right on a public park/lake with miles upon miles of bike/walking trails.  It’s perfect for the dog (which is why we chose this place).  If it wasn’t for the frequent cop visits and the murderer who lived three buildings down it would be an awesome place.

*has a great apartment*

*whistles and walks away from thread*

" If it wasn’t for the frequent cop visits and the murderer who lived three buildings down it would be an awesome place."

hahaha Jewels!

Man, I feel SO lucky after reading all the posts. My apartment building is pretty charming - all brick and wood floors and radiators instead of central heat - heck, we may never leave! We do have some interesting characters living here, nonethless:

Iceman: Looks like Dwight from The Office, with a touch of "extremely f***ing looney". He leaves his door open a crack and I can hear him watching porn when I walk by to do laundry. I call him Iceman because he's always walking back and forth from the corner Sevy with two Big Gulp cups full of ice. Why? Why does he need the ice? Sexual tension? Bodies in the tub? We may never know.

Handsome Gay Coffee Boy: He's a sweetie, except for his underlying hatred of me. What did I do? I married my husband, that's what. He loves my husband and is very vocal about it. He proposed a three-way marriage the other day. On the plus side, this benefits our budget - my husband is never without free coffee PLUS he goes through the day knowing he's hot. One of these days, when I'm underneath a tire and covered in my own blood, I'll have the piece of mind knowing my husband is taken care of and who my murderer is.

Cat Lady: She has five cats. I have three. She smokes in her house. I can smell it in mine. If I weren't seeding off her wireless internet, I'd be pretty pissed.

I have a condo. Which is the same thing as an apt sorta but I own it. I have no real complaints. Part of my monthly Homeowner's dues goes to onsite maintenance staff who are here 9-5, M-F and they are awesome. And one of the head maintenance dudes, his son lives here at the complex. I call him when I need extra "manly" help in the off hours like moving furniture and stuff like that. Pretty much all of my neighbors are older folks who don't work. It's very quiet and they look out for me. Almost everyone has pets too which is totally cool. Out of the 120 units, about 100 of them are lived in by the owners (like me). So folks take really good care of everything. The units are old and sturdy so the walls are not paper thin.

The one downside. My downstairs neighbor. He's a stinky curmudgeon. And almost every evening, without fail he burns popcorn. It's the only time I can really smell food from his place and it's sooooo nasty. And it's really cold here in Dallas so I can't open all the windows to get rid of the smell as I normally would. That is like the 2nd grossest smell ever (2nd only to burnt hair).

Original Post by jewelsmcblah:

If it wasn’t for the frequent cop visits and the murderer who lived three buildings down it would be an awesome place.

What???!?! Jewels... please tell me you're kidding?!?

That did remind me though. A lady was murdered in my complex about 2 years ago. They think it was a guy she met online. Which I better go post on Noelle's thread about matchmaking b/c they were talking about online dating there!! ;)

Uh, hello? I met my husband online and he's extreamly non-threatening/ normal. Why do people have to blame the internet for weirdos? Weirdos are everywhere! It's like saying "my friend bought cookies at the store and now she's fat...don't go to the store!!!"

Original Post by catherinerich:

Uh, hello? I met my husband online and he's extreamly non-threatening/ normal. Why do people have to blame the internet for weirdos? Weirdos are everywhere! It's like saying "my friend bought cookies at the store and now she's fat...don't go to the store!!!"

I know... I saw your post on the other thread. Sorry - I was kidding. Weirdos are everywhere!!! No doubt about that.