I'm so sick of living in crap apartments with roomates

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve lived in so many awful places. Currently, it’s quite bad. i have very little privacy at all. It’s a small place, sure, but the doors are so thin and not sealed properly. If my roomate isn’t sitting quitely in her room then I hear everything! I can hear her conversations on the phone. She does nothing wrong though, and we get along fine, but it’s quite vexing. I find myself dreading when she comes home. It’s quite annoying. Forget about having a girl over. I tried once, and I was sure that she must have heard everything!

I can hear almost everything. Also there is no living room. I find that I can’t really hang out with my roomates unless there is one. I want my room to be private, you know? I’d like to choose to go to the living room for company. The result is that we don’t talk much. No biggie, I’m content with my friends and all, I just wish I could afford a single apartment. Ugh…

Previously in DK, I had a similar situation, although I got along with him slightly better as it wasn’t so bad with the doors. I can literally see right through the cracks in my door here! But there, my door was at the end of the hall and the kitchen was next to it, so if he was in his room I couldn’t hear anything. Similarly no living room.

Let’s go back further then. Living in New York! I had probably the worst room, but not very cozy because I knew it was only for three months. No window, btw, and also no living room. But I managed to make friends with my roomates.

Then further back in Germany I lived in student housing which was great. I had a private room, so no complaints at all.

Back further to Spain. This was the best possible situation. I had a small room, but I had a very nice living room. I was always in there hanging out with my roomates. They were great. Modern place with a good location, and also very cheap.

But now, It’s awful, I seriously dread it when she’s here because I feel like my privacy is being intruded. Maybe I should fix the door somehow, but in such an old house, there’s not a whole lot to be done…

What’s the worst living arrangements you’ve had? I wish I could have a way out. I’ve been thinking of talking to her to leave two months early and have my security deposit pay the rest, but I dunno. If I ever get a good job, I’ll see what it would cost to have two flats, if I can find another one cheap enough…It’d be worth it for the short term

2

Well, let’s see…I was homeless on the streets of New York City, and finally found a job working off the books in exchange for staying oin a room in the back of the business. I actually had a bathroom and a room of my own.

3

Dorm rooms for two years were not fun. The ‘nice’ dorms on my campus cost more than tuition, so I was in the crappier ones. Sophomore year, my roommate and I made our beds into an L shape, with mine halfway under hers too, and with our desks there was only like a 4x4 ft space to move around in the middle and 2 feet in front of the closets. No fun. Aboslute zero privacy. No room to hang out.

Now I live in a shit apartment with a roommate. My room isnt’t super small, but I also don’t have a dresser and I got a very small desk. I just hate that I can hear her talk to her mom on the phone at like 6am. And our neighbors (we live in a four-plex) are all weird. Everything in here is falling apart and old/gross, dark. I’m moving out in May and cannot wait. We have a living room at least, ugly mismatched furniture and a weird setup but its okay. We didn’t have cable outlets in the bedrooms and I didn’t feel like paying for one to be installed, so I’m in here a lot watching TV, because the neighbors don’t like my music.

4

**Merkwurdigliebe ** - no higher paying jobs where you could afford a better place? How about a little further from the city? Are you still a student? Could you get two jobs perhaps?

5

It’s a work permit situation. I’m working on it though. My job sucks too, and I hate that, but I’ll have to see what I can do. I’m thinking of getting a TESOL certificate.

6

I rented a house that was so shitty the bathroom floor was always wet and a gigantic hole was rotted through the shower wall. And didn’t my adorable four-year-old throw open the door when I was standing in said see-thru shower so the caller could see right in! Yeeeeaaaaahhhhh…good times.

7

When I was going to school I bought a used mobile home. It was cheaper than an appartment and I later sold it for what I paid for it. I used the money on the down payment on a modest home which I then paid off. I’ve never paid more than $350 a month for living space.

8

Worst living arrangement? I think perhaps the time I had arranged a flatshare with a good friend in Surrey, then went back to Glasgow for a month or two, until the flat was to become available. When I went south again, my friend kindly met me off the train in London and tried VERY hard to avoid telling me that our flat had fallen throughth. It happened that I mentioned that I had met an old friend of ours while visiting St. Andrews and had given him our “new address”. This was greeted, not with “ooh, that’s fine, yes, it will be good to hear from him”, but instead with “Um … Ahem. Um. Thing is, Celyn …” And the blasted landlord had changed his mind. (My friends were only trying, as they explained, to put off telling me for a little while, because, as they explained, bad news would seem more acceptable after a bit of dinner and a few glasses of wine.)

So, there followed a desperate search for somewhere to stay which ended up with me in a fairly dreadful bedsit house with no living room, and the only bath was actually in the (tiny) kitchen. :eek: I go on very well with one of the people there, but very very badly with one other.
Merkwurdigliebe, I DO sympathise, but please don’t get yourself into having to pay for two places at once. You are due to move out in two months, right? Just tell yourself “this too shall pass” and get very busy flat-hunting. Two months WILL pass all right, as long as you focus on knowing that the end is in sight. Wishing you the very best of luck. :slight_smile:

9

Good grief! Right, I’m moving to Ohio. :slight_smile:

10

I once rented a basement apartment sight unseen. I was about 600 km away from the city I was moving to I really didn’t want to waste an entire weekend busing there and back just to try and find a place. I was only renting for 4 months anyway so I figured that I could deal with it for a short period of time.

To be honest, my parents are more traumatized over that place than I am. The place was filthy when I got there, but it wasn’t that much of a job to clean up. The air was incredibly dusty, and I’ve had bad alergic reactions to basements before, but I was smart enough to bring an air filter with me. The worst thing about it was that spiders kept turning up, and I hate spiders and insects.

Still, the location was excellent and rent was dead cheap. I’d never live there again, but it honestly wasn’t as bad as my parents are always saying.

11

Is TESOL a good opportunity in Denmark? I’ll start working on a Masters this summer, and overseas work is one of my options.

12

Haha, funnily enough, the room in the bedsit house that I mentioned above was also a case of “sight unseen” Wonder why? :slight_smile: In fact, in that case, the landlord’s agent actually failed to turn up at our agreed time to let me in to see the room. Admitedly, this was long before the days of ubiquitous mobile 'phones/cellphones, so he could not have telephoned me to cancel/re-arrange,but all the same, it was pretty bad-mannered. I got the room 'cos a friend who already theoretically lived in the house (but actually spent most of his time in girlfriend’s much much nicer flat) volunteered to run to the public 'phone box and remonstrate with landlord’s agent.

Friend apparently told agent that he thought it was pretty rotten to ask a young woman who didn’t even know the area at all well, (or or to ask anybody, for that matter) to go wandering about to meet someone who rudely failed to show up, so agent fella merely asked “do you know this girl, Michael, and would you say she is an all right sort of person and tenant? All right, then, ask her to come to my house at blah-address on Sunday evening with the deposit money and a witness to sign the lease”. (Not a perfect idea, either, as without the help of a friend with a car, I can tell you that public transport to a place I did not know on a Sunday evening would have been a nightmare.) Weird.

Still, that was another case, where the location and so on was pretty all right, and some good times were had in that period*, to be fair, and I moved out many months later - i.e as soon as I could afford to, with my shitty temp job.

I **hope **the OP gets a better place soon. (Or I could send him a tent. :slight_smile: )

  • Oops, on reflection, I think good times in Reigate ( a nice enough town, with some enjoyable walks nearby) did largely depend upon some herbal smokes, and, of course, having old good friends from university days nearby. :slight_smile: Mainly the latter. Bad situations can be handled, as long as there is always SOME relaxation or fun, preferably the company of old and good friends. I’d hate to live there again, though, and I think I would end up in a straitjacket if I had to: I am enjoying being a lone-living hermit these days.
13

Not only that but now I’ve got a hoard of rioters outside my door!

Okay not really. I live in another neighborhood. But I’m very curious. I’d like to go see what’s up, but then again, I don’t want to get accidentally arrested…

So, about TESOL in DK?

Well, there’s really no way to get black work in DK unless you want to flip burgers, then you’ll need to know Danish, so forget that on both accounts.

The Danish Government, in it’s infinite wisdom, has imposed tuition on all foreigners outside of the EU to study in Denmark. I would have imagined that it’d be on the same level as other European unis, but no. It’s 10,000 dollars. Per semester or per year, I’m not sure, but it’s certainly not worth it. It’s not like there are loads of people coming in anyway, because to get a student visa you also have to prove that you have about 8,000 dollars in funds for the coming year! so yeah, you need 18,000 dollars in funds to study here. What a joke! However i got in before the tuition. I had a student visa which allows you to work up to 18 hours a week. However they don’t seem to check if you surpass that.

As far as TESOL goes? I’ll let you know. There is english-teaching work, though. Most Danes are very good at it, but the older, business-folk need some help. It’s usually done at a much higher level than you’d see in France, I imagine.

14

And yes, the reason why I end up in such shit situations is that I tend to make rash decisions about where I am going to live. In the middle of my apartment search, I decided to look for an apartment in a new town. If you aren’t living there, then it indeed causes problems. I saw pictures, and the layout of the place is fine, but the privacy situation is awful

15

I’ve been pretty happy with all my living situations so far, although the one I’m in right now is probably the worst in relative terms. I’m living with my brother in a basement, which is pretty clean and well-lit, but has a really weird structure - the kitchen has no counter space and there’s a huge living room but only one bedroom. So right now my brother is living in the living room and we use the dining room for our living room (although we never have any guests to speak of). Plus we haven’t the time/money to furnish this place properly so even though it’s been 3 months since we moved in it look like we moved in yesterday. I suppose the worst part is the lack of privacy - my brother’s room has no door, and the walls are so thin that we can hear most things through the walls. It leads to some awkward situations.

16

Yes, but then you’d have to live in Ohio…

My worst living situation wasn’t because the apartment was crap; it was fine, actually kind of nice. It was a roommate that made me nuts; she was a friend of a friend and seemed perfectly nice. I need a fair amount of time alone, though, and I didn’t know that she couldn’t be alone. So from the moment that I’d get home from work until I went to bed, she wanted to do stuff together. Which mainly involved me cooking her dinner (otherwise she’d have a PB&J sandwich and look at me mournfully while I ate whatever thing I’d thrown together for me), then her following me around. I’d try and read a book, and she’d ask me what I was reading, what’s it about, etc., etc. It got to the point where I’d come home, make my dinner while I ignored her, then retreat to my room. When the lease was up, I ditched her.