As proud of myself as I was to have my first apartment so young, I wish I had looked at more places before jumping into one. It looked so good, high ceilings, built ins, a great pantry, and an office space. This nice looking place fairly quickly turned into a living nightmare. For anyone going through a similar experience, please do your research and contact the right people!
I was never really young and dumb as I get told often I’m an old soul but I was certainly young and naive. I’ve always believed people had good intentions, however my landlord at the time did not have a care in the world for the tenants of this building. A week after signing a second one year lease, the bedroom ceiling started to leak. For months I sent photos and videos to the landlord and property manager. It wasn’t too concerning as it was small and didn’t do much damage so I never fought them as to why they never did anything about it.
But then, in just one night, after getting home late, I found the bedroom ceiling light hanging by the wires, pouring water right between where my bed was and my tv was. There was a clear line of water damage across the entire ceiling. That night I moved out of the bedroom and into the living room.
As if that wasn’t embarrassing enough to have guests over like that, the leak continued to get worse and I had buckets all over the bedroom. The landlord hired people to patch it but the patch never held and they refused to pay to have the roof fixed to stop the problem. Every time it rained I’d have to poke holes in the ceiling to drain water from a new spot into a bucket.
Next thing I knew, there was a leak in our pantry ruining all of the food that was in there. Again, I complained and started trying to fight for things to be fixed. It started getting worse to live there because now the crew they hired to fix the building would show up at random times and even appeared frighteningly in my window in the middle of the day.
The nightmare only came to an end when the building was bought by a new landlord and I broke the lease to move into my current apartment. Thankfully the new landlord was very apologetic and understood why I was frantic to leave the building.
Everyone has to start somewhere and sadly that’s where I started. But that apartment taught me to be thankful for what I did have and taught me to be minimalistic. Now I’m more careful before buying things or signing contracts. I know more about apartment laws and rights I have as a tenant.
At the end of the day, you always have to remain positive and be a problem solver rather than wait for someone else to save you. My landlord never would’ve willingly fixed the problem so I did what I had to for my own happiness. It really taught me to make the best of every situation and make a bad place still feel like home and after I lost an entire room, I learned how to make rooms function for more than one thing. That’s what made me love home decorating so much and taught me to indulge in hobbies to distract myself and daydream.