NationStates Jolt Archive

Okay, so this is the FIFTH (5th) day in a row my apartment has been without HOT WATER. This really sucks. Part of my job invovlves smelling like stinky armpit at the end of my shift. I've had to go to friends in order to have a shower, haven't been able to the dishes in days. Its unusual its been such a long time without the problem being fixed, as the landlord is usually super-quick about fixing such things... argh.

So maybe others could share their housing nightmares. Any "So you think you have it bad?" stories would be much appreciated...misery loves company

-JG, the filthy stinking Canadian

I've been happy never to have any sort of horribly bad thing happen to me in this respect, even if I did have to tell my last landlord to go fuck herself and shove her deposit you know where.

Well, I live in a 100 year old farmhouse in the middle of the city....its actually a fantastic place to live, but its showing its age. This is the first time I've had a problem here. First time I've had a problem with housing since my student days (when such things are par for the course)

been living in this wholly unfinished house that we've been 'doing up' for 10 years now. the bathroom is bare basics (though plumbed, thankfully) and you have to hop over loose floorboards to get to it. stepping on the wrong one leads to sepping through the floor - which has only been done twice, suprisingly. two years ago we upgraded from our one-ring electric hob in the kitchen, but we still don't have hot water in there. everything else in the rest of the house is pretty much unfinished, but better than it was, say, 5 years ago.
and the last house i lived in took 10 years to do up as well, but at least after 10 years it was finished... unlike this one where we're still only half way through :headbang:

I lived in the middle of the desert during the First Gulf War, and went without a bath for over 65 days.

I had some very interesting experiences back when we lived in The City. Either the boiler was broken, the pipes were clogged, or the air was full of smoke because something else had broken. We started out living on the 1st floor, but moved out because of the roaches and the fact that whenever something was repaired downstairs, we got the fumes. We were frustrated and moved up to the top floor, the 12th. There we discovered that the roof leaked. Plus, we got flying roaches. Not fun.

Anyway, we're now living in a perfectly normal house in a somewhat smaller town with no problems, and it belongs to us, too. Thank you for listening to the Concordance's boastful bragging. ;)

~The Libertarian Concordance of Czardas~
Official NationStates Housing Story Narrator

When my wife and I first got married, we moved into a shithole trailor in a shithole trailor park. The ceiling had a peak, whick had trim on the seams, but being that it was old, their were gaps about an eighth inch wide. Something must have died in the ceiling, because one day I was sitting their watching tv and all of the sudden a freakin MAGGOT dropped out of the ceiling and landed on my lap! We had to duct tape the entire ceiling, but every once in a while, one would get through, and fall to the floor. Worst part? The couch was directly below the seams.

We lived in horror for two weeks waiting for the damn things to turn into flies.

~EDIT~ It was also in Erie ,Pennsylvania which got down to the teens in winter, so we constantly had broken or frozen water pipes, so I would get up EXTRA early, and melt snow on the stove so my wife could flush the toilet when she got up.

I moved out of my parent's house when I was 15 1/2 I made minimum wage and could only work about 60 hours a week then because I was still going to highschool. The apartment that I moved into was really really bad.

One spring a really bad thunderstorm came and screwed up my apt. I had a hole in the roof that I could see daylight through (and rain came in) and sewage was coming up through the sinks and bathtubs. It was sooo bad. It took the manager like 3 weeks to get it fixed so I lived in the back of the Taco place I was working at for nearly a month, I finally got back into my apartment everything was fixed (half-assed) and cleaned. I stayed for the last month of my lease before moving out and the landlord tried to sue me when I moved out for abandonment (because I didn't live there for a month even though I did pay the rent) and for new carpet because the raw sewage had ruined it and he had to replace it.
I got a lawyer who went to court and pointed out to the judge that at 16 I was too young to sign a lease and therefore couldn't be sued for anything pertaining to the apartment. :D The landlord had to give back my deposit and the rent for the month that the apt was uninhabitable.

I love my lawyer :D

I live at the top floor in an 8 floor apartment block.
Until 6 years ago, a sort of weird, small grey cockroaches that I've seen in no other place would appear out of nowhere.
The greatest cockroach invasions were at times when the neighbours downstairs used pesticide products to get rid of them. The bugs went upstairs...
Some way, this problem got fixed and no cockroaches appeared in years, but I unfortunately have crazy neighbours right under me.
For a few years, there were daily noises of hammers, drills and screwdrivers, because they've torn down some walls and rearranged their apartment. Or maybe they hammered things for pleasure, because all that can be done in a few weeks normally.
After that, one of my batrooms started having a constant stink of bad food, that came through the vertical air vents. Apparently they moved their kitchen in that part of the apartment.
Given the way it smells, I hope they'll die of food poisoning.
As if that wasn't enough, they have two dumb daughters that throw very loud parties quite often and listen to a local kind of music that is loathed by any decent person in these parts. They like to do it on sunday nights, probably as a sign of respect for people that go to work or school the next day.
No amount of threatening, police intervention and scandals made them stop in years, so everybody has come down to ignoring them by now.
I sometimes wish there was a way I could elude physical assault laws the way they can elude public disturbance noises. I'd so pay them a visit with a crowbar, in the middle of a party...

I live in a matchbox-like appartement (basically, one room, a bathroom, a kitchenette or whatever it's called). I get hot water quite regularly, but I have to wait for it to heat up. Cold water has the most horrible taste anytime between 12 AM and 9 AM. Sometimes I get a rude awakening through the services of an industrial plant across the road - a sound so piercing my teeth hurt. Fortunately, there are no more thumb-sized roaches (except on the bottom floor, where they feed on the vomit of countless alcoholics who spend the night).
One morning, a guy was savegely beating a woman across the street (using the door of the building in the process). Usually, it's just junkies who sit on the hall and heat spoons without caring wether anybody's watching. One day, as I opened the hall door, three of them were discussing attacking someone with a knife - they interrupted their talk to greet me.

While my apartment is in a nice building in a nice neighbourhood, I'm cursed with the bedroom that is perpetually too hot.

Even if it's -40C out (yes, even in Toronto!) I leave the window open to keep my room human in temperature. And right now, the weather is NOT A/C weather and yet, I'm running it at medium power and my room is only now tolerable. The rest of the apartment is normal in temperature.

That and I swear this place is built on an ancient burial ground - how else does one explain a fan, rested securely (a small one designed for desks) on a shelf in the bathroom, fall into the shower I'm in? That was weird! At least it unplugged before it fell in. But no one had touched it and it was stabling resting...

I've also seen watches get reset... and heard stuff rattle in the kitchen with the cat sitting next to me.

Housemate blew up the toilet.......*sigh*

If you want to do dishes, put a pot of cold water on the stove and pour half into one side of the sink and half into the other. Put soap in one half and leave the other half or put some cold water in it if it's too hot. There you go, wash side, rinse side.


My old place didn't have hot water for two days, I didn't shower and was planning on going to a friend's house if it stayed off.

Once the washing machine broke (laundry was included in the rent) and my landlord didn't replace it for nearly a month. I went to my parent's to do laundry, one of my roommates witheld his rent until it was fixed (he couldn't go home to do laundry, at all)

That place was pretty dirty too.

Okay, so this is the FIFTH (5th) day in a row my apartment has been without HOT WATER. This really sucks. Part of my job invovlves smelling like stinky armpit at the end of my shift. I've had to go to friends in order to have a shower, haven't been able to the dishes in days. Its unusual its been such a long time without the problem being fixed, as the landlord is usually super-quick about fixing such things... argh.
-JG, the filthy stinking Canadian

The water on my family's farm was completely undrinkable, due to a number of factors I won't get into. Also, one summer we were without "running" water at all.

So, we used to haul drinking water from a well on a neighbouring farm a couple miles away. Or melt snow in a huge 500 gallon drum in the basement, in the winter. That in itself wasn't so bad. But the summer we had no running water at all, we had to take 5 gallon buckets and carry water to the house from the dugout the cows drank from. This was the water we used for washing dishes, taking baths, washing clothes, flushing the toilet, etc. Our arms got very strong packing those buckets of water around. And we got used to using the old outhouse out back, because it was easier than packing water to flush the toilet.

In the meantime, if you are just short of hot water, heat it up on the stove! It's not that hard to get enough warm water for a sponge bath, wash dishes, or even wash your hair.

The first apartment I lived in after leaving home had its heat controlled by a central thermostat that no one could touch (it being in a locked cage). Heat turned on at 3 pm and 3 am for about 20 minutes. Even though we were in temperate Victoria, it got cold - because we had free hot water, we ran a hose from the bathtub faucet all through the apartment and then back into the bathtub. We kept hot water running at a steady rate, and it worked almost as well as a real radiator to keep things warm.

Also, the ancient ice box (not a real fridge) that we had defrosted automatically sometime after midnight on Friday nights. So if you forgot to put towels down before going to bed Friday, there was a huge puddle of cold water on the kitchen floor to wake you up on Saturday morning.

Where to start?

I lived in a Volkswagen Bus twice.

For a few months I lived in a projection booth. At around 11 pm I would 'disapear' and hide. The place would shut down and I would sleep in the booth. Just before 9am I would sneak out the back and 'show up' early. I showered at the gym that shared the complex. I shared this arrangement with the maitnence man who lived in a hole in the wall that only he knew about. Inside he had set up a full on room, it was pretty impressive.

Later, I got a room I shared with that same dude in a house that was involved in a legal battle because the owner didn't believe that property taxes where constitutional. The 'stewarts' of the house where a bunch of meth addicts, so everything was in a state of dissassembly. They where also the same people that had been caught trying to steal my VW Bus six months earlier.

I had a roommate after all of that that was pocketing my bill money and telling my other roommate that I was holding out on him. He was also making thousands of dollars, that's thousands, in phone sex calls.

Prior to all of that, I lived in a 4 bedroom that had eight roommates and a ninth rotating 'mystery roommate,' one of which was the smelliest dude I had ever encountered who actually grunted at me when I went for one of my biscuits that he took the liberty to make while I was gone.

I lived over a heroin addict and across from a pimp. Someone in the same complex celebrated the 4th by firing a pistol in the air. In front of my mom. Every once in a while while I lived there, while I sat in the living room someone would test the doorknob.

That's the short list.

Summer Camp. (After 6 weeks I'd call it housing ;))
Thunderstorms are no fun if the only thing between you and them is canvas. We staffers got electricity, but occasionally some idiot would expose their socket to the elements, blow a fuse by turning on to many things, or yank the plug out to shut up the stereo further along the line. The mice were no fun either...

~EDIT~ It was also in Erie ,Pennsylvania which got down to the teens in winter, so we constantly had broken or frozen water pipes, so I would get up EXTRA early, and melt snow on the stove so my wife could flush the toilet when she got up.
woah that kinda sucks :(

I once made the mistake of living in a 3 bedroom apartment with 5 people. Need more really be said?

Oh...do I have a story for this thread.

Unfortunatley, I don't have time to type it all out right now, so consider this a tag. :)

I once made the mistake of living in a 3 bedroom apartment with 5 people. Need more really be said?

When I first moved into my place, there were 4 Korean college students living in a single small room next door.

Most of my problems have been neighbors. The worst was probably the Brazilian speed freak on steroids who tried to throw his girlfriend down the stairs one night...

Okay, I'm back...here goes...

When I was in eighth grade (13 years old), my parents hired a contracter to put a new roof on our house.

They started pretty late in the year (it was the last week of September when they finally began work), but they did something that to this day baffles the hell out of me...

...they took off the whole roof on the first day.

There was still the underlying boards of course, but no roofing felt, tar paper, shingles or sealant of any kind. They finished the roof over the kitchen, maybe a quarter of the job, over the course of the next two days.

They "protected" the house overnight with a tarp, that was loosely tied down with rope in three places.

On the third day after they had taken the roof off, it rained. It then rained every day for eight straight days. The tarp essentially blew off after the third day of rain, and the end result was not pretty.

By the third day of rain, water was leaking in to the rooms on the upper floor, most notably my parents bedroom. By the seventh day water was leaking in every room of the house, including the basement, and we went to stay at the local Holiday Inn where my mom worked part-time.

During this entire time we were making calls to the roofing company, but never got in contact with anything other than an answering machine.

End result: over $20,000 in water damage to the house. Thankfully paid for in full by Allstate Insurance, which then sued the roofing company and won. This resulted in the bankrupcy of that delightful construction company.

While the repairs to the house were being made, we ended up having to stay at the Holiday Inn for an additional 35 days. I had to get up two hours early for the drive to my friends house before going to school, and being confined in a hotel room with my parents at the age of 13 drove all three of us batshit insane by the second week.

The worst part was towards the end, we had an unseasonably early blizzard. Over ten inches of snow and -30 F wind chill. During any other school year, this would have cancelled school in the district. Not that year! :mad:

I still haven't forgiven the Superintendant of my school district for that, despite the fact that I am no longer in school.

We ended up making out pretty well on the whole situation...new roof, new carpeting downstairs, new wallpaper upstairs, new paint essentially everywhere.

But those 40 or so days were a living fucking nightmare.

I lived in the middle of the desert during the First Gulf War, and went without a bath for over 65 days.
LOL! Can't beat that one! I can relate on certain levels though, as I've been homeless at one point and have also canoed, hiked into & camped out deep in the northern wilderness for 2 months (more than once) You know its bad when you can smell yourself and yu don't give a shit anymore.

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Thats insane!

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Life with junkies is certainly...interesting and stressful.

My husband and I purchased our home eight years ago and have decided that instead of trying to remodel it (we'd have to take it down to the studs) we're just going to tear it down and rebuild.

Too many things going wrong like: really old windows that are essentially pieces of glass sandwiched between the wood trim, floors that have separated from the masonry so that there's a direct vent to the crawlspace, water damage and a bad repair from the previous owners (hubby had to jack up that corner of the house, remove the floor and rebuild the joist!), the electrical circuits are 10 different kinds of messed up, none of the outlets are grounded, the wiring is old and corroding, the roof was put on so badly, AlphaGeek is surprised we don't have water dripping on our heads when it rains, badly poured concrete walkway funnels rainwater towards the foundation rather than away, uninsulated walls, and an inefficient layout means no hot water in the bathroom for about 5 minutes - and when you're paying what we pay for electricity that's a long time to run your water heater with no result.

We actually went to an architect and the remodel they proposed was so extensive to address all the problems that AlphaGeek and I just decided to tear down and rebuild.

When I was six I lived in a really crummy trailor with my parents and my cousin with two german sheppards.

1 bedroom trailor/2 big dogs + Annoying cousin + parents = Hell

Nowhere near as bad as what I've read so far but still pretty bad especially when you're 6. Right now I'm living in a dorm room at Juniata College in PA.