I was reading something online and the woman said in her current flat she thought she was getting a break as the way the building was set up on her floor there was the office, the laundry room and the other three sides of her flat faced the outside.
So she thought it’d be less noisy. Then she stated that what she failed to realize is though she knew the washers and driers would be noise, she thought it’d be like white noise. Which she said it was, except that in addition to that, the people doing laundry would be doing it 24 hours a day. They were slamming the machines, then some of them would talk on cell phone while doing their wash. Turns out it was a bad move
(See I told you the whole story to get to my question :))
Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to list a bunch of signs you clearly saw BEFORE you rented the apartment but ignored and went ahead anyway.
One thing I learned was to always look around the main garbage area. I found if that is a mess, that is a real bad sign.
The location of the washer/dryer. In my current apartment, the washer/dryer is located in the hall between the second bedroom and the master bedroom. It is close enough to the master bedroom that it can be heard in the master bedroom, so that makes doing laundry early in the morning impractical.
Is there a bathroom in or near the apartment gym/pool? I don’t like having to go all the way back to my apartment in the middle of a workout.
I thought being really close to a transit train station would be great, but it was also close to an intersection that had one of those arms that lower with lights and bells. The trains ran until 2:00am and those bells could be heard crystal clear in my bedroom.
I spent a weekend at a friends apartment in Philly. The kitchen windows overlooked a KFC parking lot. Early in the am there would be a congregation of street people going through the dumpsters for breakfast. Not very appetizing.
Proximity to Fire/Ambulance/Police services.
I rented a corner apartment once, and the corner faced onto a street that the fire trucks would almost always go down if a call was put out
It was really, really annoying hearing a fire truck peel out at 2AM because some drunk frat kid threw up, fell down, and got knocked unconscious or whatever shit that wasn’t a fire yet they were responding to.
(wasn’t really “ignored” so much as “didn’t realize”, though)
Really take a look at who you’re renting from and how management behaves. If they live on site, make sure their grown children aren’t thieving drug addicts who steal your little girl’s change out of her purse when they come over to borrow five bucks right after meeting them.
It got much much worse before new management took over. Then it was unbearable.
Make sure the place can be heated properly! (More exclamation points can be added if necessary.) Look at the heating, see how many registers there are, make sure it’s not just space heaters, they don’t work well! It is best to have three of our four outer apartment walls in the interior of the building, yeah, it’s dark but it’s warm and you won’t regret it. The fewer windows the better, and check around each window to see if you can feel fresh air. There was one crack big enough to stuff socks in in my last apartment!
Along with this, look at the thickness of the outer and adjoining walls, tap them if necessary. If it sounds too hollow sound will travel and heat will be lost.
Try to get a top floor apartment. You don’t want the situation I had where the lady above me couldn’t sleep more than three hours at a time and would pace restlessly at 3 in the morning. I had to resort to earplugs eventually, which made me feel vulnerable as I was living by myself. I like hearing if someone is breaking in.
Heat and noise – maximise one whilst minimising the other.
egress and access points. We once rented a basement apartment with illegal windows in the bedrooms. They were those little tiny things that were about 12" tall so nothing bigger than a terrier could fit through them. There was also one door to come in and it entered into the kitchen. The floor plan was very awkward and also very unsafe.
We couldn’t have predicted the monthly sewage back up in the shower because the idiot woman above us thought she could flush pads and tampons down 50 year old pipes. That was fun to deal with when we were way too poor to come up a new deposit to move. We were lucky that the upstairs apartment stayed empty for about half the time we lived there.
Storage, storage, storage. I moved into an apartment that seemed to have good cupboards and a decent closet, but I didn’t realize that the cupboards were really shallow, had shelves too close together and had random bars running through them, making it really difficult to fit anything of even moderate size.
I rented an apartment once that had a tiny faucet in the sink and no hose… it was just about impossible to rinse any dishes.
I also rented an apartment where the dumpsters were almost a full block away, so when I had garbage, I had to haul it all the way down the block. When I lived there, I got rid of an armchair that was falling apart and dragged that all the way down the block. It wouldn’t fit in my car, so I couldn’t just throw it in there and drive it to the dumpsters… I had to drag it. Yuck.
The worst was that I rented a first floor apartment (in a 3 story building) and all of the heat registers were right under windows. Most of the heat went right out the old windows, the rest went through the ceiling to the higher floors. Lucky for me, water was free, so when I was really freezing, I would turn the shower on as hot as possible, close the bathroom door and thaw myself in the steam.
Isn’t that *usually *where the radiators are? (I have no idea what a heat register is.) The idea is because the windows will be the least insulated and will let cold air in, so you’d want to put the heat right in front of it. Otherwise you’d end up with a freezing cold spot next to the window.
I echo a prior poster’s warning about railroad tracks. My first apartment had tracks running behind the building. At 2:00 AM every day, the frieght train rolled by and then came screeching to a halt. For the next our, we got the sound of people unloading the cargo into the warehouse.
Also, when a property is located on a street called River Road, that usually indicates the presence of a river. Rivers can and do flood. So you might have th local fire department show up one stormy night and inform everyone that they are being transported to the local elementary school gym due to a possible flood. If that happens, tell the firefighter that you forgot your cell phone in the apartment, run back, pack some clean clothes and sneak out the back way. Hop into your car and drive to a hotel.
Heat registers, usually set in the floor or along the baseboard, are for forced hot air. None of the ones in our house are under windows.
My parents regret renting a unit of a three-family apartment building with inadaquate parking. Even/Odd parking is bad enough, but when it snowed there was no parking allowed on either side of the road. Zares a mile and a half down the road was nice enough to allow people to park overnight as long as folks collected cars by 6 a.m. but that was a long cold hike home after parking.
They’re offering girlfriends with apartments now? Man, I knew the economy was bad but that’s a hell of a deal. Did you have to pay extra for the amenity?
It could just be that my neighbors are unconsciously loud people, but I wish I’d been able to assess the soundproofing between floors. I live on the ground floor, and since December or so I’ve been able to hear my upstairs neighbors’ movements. I can hear their footsteps. The floor squeaks. I can sorta hear conversations, as well as the soft thumping of piano pedals and less-soft Rock Band drumming. Hell, I can sometimes hear them peeing literally right above me when I’m on the toilet.
I think it’s just them, because I’ve lived here nearly 3 years and only recently noticed the sounds. But it’s still something I should have considered, especially with the hardwood floors. At least carpet buffers sound.
Also, while I love how naturally well-lit my bathroom is, I’m less in love with how well-lit the bedroom is. My work/sleep schedule is a couple hours later than most people’s, and sometimes the light wakes me up early. I have to retreat to my living room sofa to fall back asleep. I should have foreseen it, since the windows in both rooms face the same way, but it just didn’t cross my mind.
Seconded the comments about the management company. When I last rented a place we were shown around by the agent, who bent over backwards to agree to our conditions - in particular that we only wanted a place where we could put up a satellite dish. When we got the contract, it said we needed written permission to do so. ‘Excellent’ we said ‘could we have this in writing then?’ ‘you don’t need it really’ said the agent. Can you guess what happened? The day after the dish went up, we had a very rude letter from the residents’ association and the dish had to come down. The agents denied ever giving us permission, of course. (I know, we should have insisted on the written permission… lesson learned). So it was the agent’s cavalier approach to the details of their own contract that we shouldn’t have ignored in this case.
The epilogue was three years later when we came to move out, and our final inspection report mentioned the cabling left from the dish installation. They wanted us to pay for its removal, solely on the grounds that we had installed originally without permission. So we had the same argument after three years, but at least we never did pay for the cable removal.
We were lucky that the upstairs apartment stayed empty for about half the time we lived there.