Oh yeah. The last apartment my wife and I was in had carpeting in the bathroom and the kitchen. I’m still amazed by that. Who carpets a kitchen?
Ah yes…
We had one of those guys come by,too.
When he came to my door, he wouldn’t tell me who he was or what he wanted, other than he was seeking for ‘John Smith’. He didn’t believe that my husband wasn’t the guy he was looking for. I must have been ‘covering’ for him (which, to be fair,happens all the time I am sure).
In fact, he ‘cruised’ our neighborhood for a week.
He finally left his business card with me…“in case I ever ran into him”.
Oh, and the other thing I loved about the former owner:
When we hooked up our cable, we recieved in our first bill, charges for a huge amount of Pay per View porn. Apparently, he didn’t paythem either.
…Or the phone company. It took an act of congress to get them to install a phone. They wanted me to clear up HIS bills. To hell with that! those are his bills, not mine!
The chick who had our last phone number before us told no one she no longer had that number.
We got calls from her friends who were dense to say the least.
Cancellation calls from all her utilities/ insurance/ etc…
Calls from DSS about her missing hearings and things…
I returned every non friend call that left a number and beseeched all the friends who I spoke to to let her know she needed to change her number with people.
We got calls for her until the day we cancelled that number almost 7 years later!
Mr2U does home remodeling/building/fire and water damage restoration, etc. He is currently rehabbing a place down in Berwyn - they guy had lived there for about ten years, stopped paying his rent, and disappeared. The owner of the building hired him to completely gut the place and redo it. Hubster and his buddy have spent two days just clearing out all the junk the guy left behind. And on a related note, I ended up with a BEAUTIFUL Wilson’s leather winter jacket! But the damage this guy did, unbelievable. Mold on the walls type damage. No mold on the coat - it’s in perfect condition.
My point, (if I ever get to it), is that people never fail to underestimate the amount of damage they inflict on their homes and the consequently high cost that these atrocities will incur when my husband is brought in by the homeowner to make their world right again. There are some people who should not, not, NOT EVER do any kind of home repair. Ever. There are also some people who should live in cages at the local zoo, versus actual dwellings - I never really appreciated how far security deposits had to go until meeting Mr2U and knowing what he charges, and seeing some of the damage he has to repair. This is why I’m a model tenant. And will never ever ever be a landlord.
I hear ya barkin’. Good God. I have almost never been as livid as I was when we moved into our current (also our first) house. Keep in mind that I had just spent three days doing almost nothing but cleaning the apartment we moved out of, scrubbing everything including the walls. Only to be greeted by the great shithole of slobhood that somehow didn’t seem that bad–in fact, seemed downright clean!–during the house tour or the inspection.
To make it all worse, the former owners, during the closing, had said that they’d hired a maid service to clean the kitchen and bathroom. MY ASS. Or, maybe by “maid service,” they meant that they’d paid the kid next door $2 to maybe run a sponge over the counter. maybe.
Some highlights:
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Piss and pubic hair crusting the toilet’s surface, the toilet bowl, the floor around the toilet, and the floor by the bathtub. Pubic hair sans piss everywhere else in the bathroom. Oh, what a delight it was to come into my new home and have to wipe up someone else’s fucking piss and curlies.
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The refrigerator’s position seemed odd, so I scooted it over to the right and back against the wall. Which revealed the horribly torn and warped vinyl flooring under it. Yay! Points for deliberate deception!
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The kitchen was dirty, dirty, dirty. And I am not a clean freak, but this didn’t even meet my relaxed standards. There was old oil coating everything around the stove, which had become tacky, dark and attractive to things like dust, small insects and hair. Yum!
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They painted the windows without tape, so there was a 2 - 3" border of white paint all around each pane of glass. Some windows are three stories off the ground, so there are some we have yet to fix.
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Some windows literally fall out of their sills of you open them. One of the windows turned out to be made of plastic.
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Pretty much every single water-bearing appliance broke within one month of us moving in. To wit:
- The kitchen garbage disposal
- The washing machine
- Both toilets
- The dishwasher’s outlet pipe froze due to improper insulation, so when the dishwasher tried to drain, it blew the pipe off and water went all over the floor
- The pipes behind the bathtub failed and water soaked through to the dining room ceiling, flooding the china hutch and the floor, leaving nice stains above and below. This also meant that the plumber had to cut through the wall to get to the pipes. The hole is now covered with a white board. That looks classy, let me tell you.
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They left garbage, clumps of dust and hair, and all their shitty curtains and rugs all over the place. They had a dog, so most of them stank on top of being filthy.
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There had been a fire at some point, which we knew about when we bought the house. What we didn’t know, until we rebuilt the stairs, was that the fire had gutted all the stair’s support. The treads were held in place by virtue of being built into the skirtboard on one side at the banister on the other. If the old, dry, cracked wood (which had never been treated) had happened to split, the person would have crashed all the way through and into the basement. The carpenter was horrified.
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The porch and back deck the previous owners had built are overspanned, and they’d built them and then done absolutely nothing to protect the wood. No stain, no seal, no poly, no nothing. After using several products to try to remove as much weathering as we could, we sealed them and they look much better.
I love the house now, but man, I was hating it and life when we first moved in. It was built in 1906, so I like to think that we’re FINALLY treating this old house the way it deserves, and the next owners are going to get a honey of a place. The previous owners I want to kick in the shins, for the piss and pubes more than anything. What a disrespectful thing to do!
Amen, my brotha. You should see my front door- some assclown painted it white on the outside (it’s a gorgeous light brown color on the inside- I don’t know why they didn’t leave it) and they painted right over the gorgeous door knocker and keyhole cover- they look like they’re antique. Fucking idiots. So I"m going to remove those and strip the paint, then paint the door so it doesn’t look like drunk monkeys did it with a hairbrush. What is wrong with people?
Yeppers to both of you. My last two places were carpeted in the kitchen. The last one had carpet in the kitchen and in the bathroom…and wood floors in the living room and the bed room.
Oh, and in my current place, I have to be v-e-r-y careful of the windows… they are all only held in by putty, not even glaziers points. No storm windows or screens, either. The windows weren’t fitted for them when it was first made (it’s a pretty old victorian) and they haven’t been upgraded since then.
The place gets pretty drafty in the Vermont winters. Luckily, I don’t mind that at all. Counteracts the heat we get because we’re on the 3rd floor (so the floor is always warm…) and because you can never completely shut off the hot-water radiators. You can, however, choose between sorta-on and on, provided that the furnace is running.
The bathroom floor is linoleum that you…painted over. Yep, the floor is painted linoleum.
The kitchen floor is authentic 50s lino that is the same pattern (though a different color…or is it?) that was in my grandparent’s house when they bought it in 1950.
The water pressure SUCKS, and adjusting the temprature is different every day. It’s been 8 months that we’ve been there, and I’ve gotten so used to it that when the hot water went out here at work, I never noticed it. You see, at home, I wash my hands in whatever temprature comes out of the faucet, becase it takes 5 minutes to warm up…IF it’s going to… and after that, because of the water pressure, it takes 25 minutes to fill the tub. Showers are a bit more like ‘dribbles’, but I suppose it gets the job done.
OH, and the ceilings are all pine planks. It’s the strangest thing. The walls are that 70s pressboard “wood” paneling, and all of the ceilings are these thick pine boards.
There’s some varnish on them, but because of the little nipple-shaped drips, you can tell that it was put on after the wood was put up there.
Granted, it’s striking. It used to be my favorite ‘feature’ of the place until the 3rd bulb blew in the bedroom because of the pine pitch/sap/gooey mess that leaked down through the light fixture…and onto my bedspread.
Funnily enough, the boards shouldn’t be fresh enough to do that - even on hot days (which was when it happened) because they’ve been there for at least 20 years, from what the building manager said.
I love the apartment we currently live in (a 2-story townhouse). It rocks. But to the previous tenants:
(1) Why’d you paint the outlet covers in the kitchen red? The outlets are painted red too. What a nice touch!
(2) Nice of you to paint the giant picture window in the living room shut. We had to go at it with a borrowed crow bar to get it open.
(3) Exactly how long did you live with the toilet like that? You know, where you had to use the plunger every single time to get anything to flush down? The plumber said it was so bad, he had to put in a new toilet.
(4) You know, all you had to do was call the landlord to have the dishwasher bolted to the kitchen countertop. That way the entire dishwasher wouldn’t fall forward every time you opened it. The same goes for the missing globe for the light fixture in the dining room and the missing screens/storm windows. One call to the landlord and it was all fixed!
(5) We really like the neat geometric pieces of ugly wallpaper in the kitchen where you couldn’t figure out how to cut one or two pieces to cover the small space under the kitchen wall cabinet. Very nice overlay effect.
It’s a great place though.
Ours, apparently, used to be owned by a business. We STILL get calls asking about our rates. More importantly, we get complaints…
ring ring
“Hello?”
“Yea, uh, your guys didn’t show up today!”
“My ‘guys’?”
“You know, you were gonna have em come out…”
“I think you have the wrong number.”
“What?! Is this (number)?”
“Yes…and we’ve had it for three years now…”
“Oh. Do you know their new number?”
“No, how would I know that?”
“…oh…”
Every apartment I’ve left, I’ve cleaned out completely. Swept the floors, mopped the floors, cleaned the refrigerator, sponged the cabinets, swabbed the bathroom. But what I feel to be my acts of accruing good apartment karma have gone pretty much unheeded. When I moved into a place in Evanston, I asked my landlord to please put a lock on the front door as it opened directly onto the street and I lived in the first floor apartment of the two-story house. Months went by without a lock on the front door. My landlord decided to resolve the “problem” by installing those little gate-things in the front windows, theoretically dissuading anyone from entering the still-unlocked front door and lurking in the entryway. Several times during the winter we discovered homeless people sleeping in the entryway. Due, of course, to the lack of a simple lock on the front door. When I was moving in I also discovered a used condom flung carelessly into the back of the closet. I also found a full, unopened liter bottle of Absolut tucked behind one of the kitchen cabinets, which I certainly didn’t complain about but hardly compensated for a multitude of other issues in that place.
Spent part of this afternoon scraping paint off the hinges of the kitchen cabinets. Not only did slobbo former tenant cover them in paint, but the painter’s assistant apparently thought it was okay to slop right on over them too. :rolleyes: And of course, the plumber (who was supposed to come back yesterday morning) still hasn’t shown up.
For all the annoying little things I’ve been dealing with, I must say that none of it holds a candle to what some of you have described. It really makes you wonder what the hell people are thinking when they decide to try their own improvements!
This reminds me of some “renovations” an old neighbor of mine did to his apartment. His wife wanted to wallpaper the kitchen with a vertically striped pattern, but the old plaster walls weren’t smooth and he kept running into the problem of the stripes getting out of kilter. So to have a smooth surface for the wallpaper, he nailed sheets of plywood to the plaster walls and then papered them. The stripes were now uniformly vertical but the paper kept peeling up at the seams because a) he was using glue for a wallpaper that already had adhesive on the back, and b) he nailed the plywood to the walls rough side out. :smack:
You want hell… the people who get my parents house will be in a special version of hell!
first of all the house really needs to be condemned. Although all the broken vehicles are now gone from the yard thanks to the board of health.
There are piles of brush that have been there so long the grass grows through them.
There is a shed in the yard with doors hanging off and a big bulge in the roof.
Every outlet has been painted over except the ones that are surrounded by the nastiest paneling known to mankind.
There is cork peeling off one wall in the ‘game room’
The living room floor is 1/2 plywood and 1/2 linoleum.
The upstairs has not seen a vaccuum since I moved out 8 years ago.
The linoleum in the kitchen was once blue as were the walls. The grease/dust mix on them is amazing. I think they could hold life.
Windows are warped, painted shut, and some have ‘storms’ affixed to the insides that cover the whole window. Oh and the ‘curtains’ are sheets.
The dishwasher hasn’t worked in a decade and the sink’s leaky pipe was ‘fixed’ with some duct tape.
This is the short list. Personally I think a fire would be a mercy.
I’m amazed at these stories. How can some people live like that??? Especially when they can call a landlord???
I don’t know how I forgot the paneling. My whole house is ugly, ugly paneling. The upstairs is not so bad, because the last homeowners didn’t install it, it’s just ugly especially where they painted it. But they did try to install paneling downstairs, but they didn’t know what they were doing, and it is all warped.
Any dopers had any luck making paneling look halfway decent? How did you do it?
Line the walls with really tall bookcases? 
You may be in for a big project. AFAIK there’s nothing to be done with warped paneling apart from ripping it down, and you may discover that the walls underneath were covered for a reason (lumpy plaster, physical damage). If you really don’t want to have paneling then you’ll need to tackle the walls directly. Having helped out someone else with a similar task, I would say this is one case where putting up with the aggravation of slow contractors is worth not having to take out the old wall, wrestle with sheet rock, etc.
I found some sites with suggestions for concealing paneling that’s still in good shape:
Covering Paneling
Covering Paneling with Drywall Compound
Paint Wood Paneling
Good luck to you!