# Things You Ignored While Looking For An Apartment You Shouldn't Have **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 10, 2010, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632 "2010-04-10T13:03:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Ferret\_Herder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e47774/32.png) [@Ferret\_Herder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ferret_Herder)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2010, 1:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/21 "2010-04-11T13:18:55Z")
> [@Geek\_Mecha](#): > > 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. I shudder to think what it is about them that you can hear **them** peeing but no one else before. :eek: ---
**Author:** ![Hanna](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b3f665/32.png) [@Hanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hanna)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2010, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/22 "2010-04-11T15:04:46Z")
I rented an apartment right next to a daycare. No problem, right? Daycare runs from maybe 7-5 weekdays, right? I’d be at work, or awake anyway, so noise shouldn’t be a problem…Then I started working shifts, including the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, and my bedroom was right next to the fenced in playground equipment. They came out screaming at 9 a.m. every morning. Then again after lunch. That was when I started sleeping with a fan on all the time. ---
**Author:** ![pbbth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f9ae1b/32.png) [@pbbth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pbbth)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2010, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/23 "2010-04-11T15:15:43Z")
> [@Miss\_Woodhouse](#): > > 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. We have learned that we will never again rent a basement apartment. 7 floods in 10 months! Sometimes water comes rushing in through the closet from too much rain. Sometimes our heat pipes burst and spew boiling hot water through the place. Sometimes the boiler room next door floods and it seeps in to our place. You couldn’t pay me to live in a basement apartment again after this. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2010, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/24 "2010-04-11T15:38:39Z")
Wooden ceilings/floors _baaaad._ Any & all first floor apartments in such buildings are like living inside a snare drum. ---
**Author:** ![Caveat\_lector\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ea5d25/32.png) [@Caveat\_lector\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Caveat_lector_1)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2010, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/25 "2010-04-11T20:51:09Z")
The water. I got an apartment and while I foresaw some of the issues and was willing to put up with them do to the cheapness of the place I didn’t think to check the water. Turns out there was a problem with the water heater that caused the water to contain lots of Hydrogen Sulfide and it smelled bad and tasted worse. The landlords are good and they did fix the heater, but I’d have liked to known about it before I moved in. ---
**Author:** ![AClockworkMelon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aclockworkmelon/32/10803_2.png) [@AClockworkMelon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AClockworkMelon)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2010, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/26 "2010-04-11T20:56:43Z")
> [@Rigamarole](#): > > 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? I sure paid, all right. ---
**Author:** ![Rigamarole](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@Rigamarole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rigamarole)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2010, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/27 "2010-04-11T22:26:13Z")
> [@LunarPlexus](#): > > Have you ever had a girlfriend? He paid. 🙂 Oh yes. Luckily though I have an economy version. ---
**Author:** ![Geek\_Mecha](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ecae2f/32.png) [@Geek\_Mecha](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Geek_Mecha)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2010, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/28 "2010-04-11T23:03:14Z")
> [@Ferret\_Herder](#): > > I shudder to think what it is about them that you can hear **them** peeing but no one else before. :eek: The previous tenants just walked around wetting themselves. 🙂 I think the person I hear peeing is the guy, and perhaps because he stands when he pees, the pee has farther to fall and therefore is louder. ---
**Author:** ![freckafree](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/freckafree/32/3050_2.png) [@freckafree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/freckafree)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2010, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/29 "2010-04-11T23:30:10Z")
I lived in an apartment that wasn’t air conditioned and was on the main drag, on a corner with a traffic light. All night long, we heard the roar of 18-wheelers gearing down and using their air brakes to stop at the light. ---
**Author:** ![BigNik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/73ab20/32.png) [@BigNik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigNik)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2010, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/30 "2010-04-12T00:57:33Z")
If there’s an underground car park and you’ve got a ground floor flat, make sure that you’re not either right above the security grille (which will raise and lower every ten minutes all night) nor right above where the garbage trucks pick up the dumpsters at 4 a.m. on Thursday mornings. Concrete conducts noise better than you’d think, and echo chambers abound. Similarly, make sure that if the inhabitants of the flat don’t share the same morning hours, that the shower pipes aren’t rattling around in a wall cavity directly next to the later-waker’s bedroom. Same place for both of those. Try to work out how small inconveniences can compound. My current house has an outdoor toilet and a steep, narrow staircase up to the bedrooms. Either could be a minor issue independently, but at 3 a.m. you don’t want to sidle your way down the stairs, discover that the back door’s still deadbolted, jog up the stairs again, try to find your keys, sidle carefully down the stairs again, fumble with the lock, let yourself out and then, ablution completed, try to work out how to get back to sleep. Similarly, a small dose of food poisoning suddenly becomes a really big deal. ETA: places next door to shops, restaurants and pubs come with rats and cockroaches as part of the deal. Plan accordingly. Also note that if renovations cause the pub to move the smoking area to directly outside your bedroom window, you may have little recourse. ---
**Author:** ![amarinth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3be4f8/32.png) [@amarinth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amarinth)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2010, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/31 "2010-04-12T01:25:59Z")
“So what, I can just drive to the grocery store when I need groceries” “There’s street parking - it’ll be fine” “So what that I’m on the ground floor” and “I don’t really _need_ a garbage disposal” (to a lesser extent “a dishwasher”) It turns out that driving to a chain store is a hassle and everything costs more at local, corner grocery stores. “Street parking” means budgeting for tickets.Reserved parking spaces are the best thing ever. The ground floor meant people could look into my apartment. I really didn’t like that at all. The shades had to stay down all the time. And yes, yes I do. ---
**Author:** ![TruCelt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/trucelt/32/523_2.png) [@TruCelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TruCelt)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2010, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/32 "2010-04-12T01:46:44Z")
> [@BigNik](#): > > . . . My current house has an outdoor toilet . . I am completely blown away by this. Where do you live? Is this actually legal? You could never get away with renting such a place where I live. If you owned the house,and lived there, OK. But you’d never get a permit to rent it. If the parking is bad, everything else will be too. If there’s not enough parking, there’s not enough dumpsters, or maintenance people, or room in the pool. There’s not enough landscapers, or cleaning folks, or managers. It doesn’t matter whether you have a car or not; if the parking lot is full at 6:00pm ona weeknight, you’ll be miserable there. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2010, 2:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/33 "2010-04-12T02:16:46Z")
A lot of good points have been made here but what you should be looking for first and foremost is **good management.** All apartments are going to have some compromises; there’s no way around it. The more money you can spend, the fewer compromises you’ll have to put up with, since you’ll be able to buy your way into things like in-suite laundry. But after a certain point you’d be better off buying a house. What I’d suggest is: 1. Rent a unit in a condominium building, instead of an apartment building, if at all possible. Condo buildings are owned by (most of) the people who live there so management is usually far better. They’re also usually better maintained, better soundproofed, and have more mature (read: quieter) residents. 2. The professionalism of the building management when you rent the place is something you need to examine in detail and pay a LOT of attention to. If it looks like an amateurish operation when you’re renting it’ll be worse once you’re in their clutches. 3. A building’s hallways will tell you a lot about everything else. If the hallways are threadbare, poorly lit and smelly, the building sucks. If they’re bright and clean, the building is likely to be good. Do not be fooled by a nice, freshly cleaned and painted suite if you just walked through a shitty hallway. ---
**Author:** ![BigNik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/73ab20/32.png) [@BigNik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigNik)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2010, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/34 "2010-04-12T22:04:38Z")
> [@TruCelt](#): > > I am completely blown away by this. Where do you live? Is this actually legal? In the Inner West of Sydney - they’re not uncommon. Most of the houses around my place were built in the 1880s as two-up, two-down terraces, which originally had a kitchen and laundry built-on as a lean-to, but with the nightsoil pick-up requiring the dunny to be built backing onto the access lane at the rear of the property. When the sewer system was put in in the 1970s, Victorian-era houses weren’t equipped to take water into the house (they’re almost all double-brick, with no cavity between the bricks, so any pipes or cables have to run along the walls rather than inside them), and the lean-tos wouldn’t typically have somewhere that you could easily extend and punch through. As a result, most places either added on to the back of the lean-to (as mine did) or just plumbed the outhouse where it stood (as the neighbours on either side did). Since the 1990s, heritage restrictions mean that you can’t make too many changes to the shell or the structural integrity of a building that’s more than about 40 years old, so it’s at the point where if you wanted to bring the bathroom inside it’d be almost impossible. So, in short, perfectly legal and not uncommon. ---
**Author:** ![Tastes\_of\_Chocolate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tastes_of_chocolate/32/3232_2.png) [@Tastes\_of\_Chocolate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tastes_of_Chocolate)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2010, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/35 "2010-04-12T22:18:58Z")
Street lights. As in, does the one on the corner shine right into your bedroom window, making it almost bright enough to read at night? ---
**Author:** ![Tarwater](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/9de0a6/32.png) [@Tarwater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tarwater)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2010, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/36 "2010-04-12T22:22:41Z")
> [@Neptunian\_Slug](#): > > 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. I lived in an apartment that was right next to train tracks. It was a nuisance at first, but by the time I moved, I had become so accustomed to the sound of a train passing by that I’d associate it with going to sleep. I couldn’t fall asleep without it for awhile. It had become a very pleasant sound. ---
**Author:** ![BigNik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/73ab20/32.png) [@BigNik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigNik)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2010, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/37 "2010-04-12T23:09:26Z")
Oh, yeah - air lanes. If the wind’s blowing Easterly when you view the place, but the predominant winds are Northerly, you may find out that the landing path of the main runway of the country’s most trafficked airport passes about 50m _directly above_ the place you’re putting down a deposit for and that most places aren’t as well soundproofed from above as they are laterally. ---
**Author:** ![pepperlandgirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f17d59/32.png) [@pepperlandgirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pepperlandgirl)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2010, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/38 "2010-04-12T23:17:16Z")
“Well, yeah, it’s right next to the train tracks and only about a mile from the train yard, but how bad could it be? I mean, who even uses trains anymore?” Lots of people, apparently. All night, every night, all we’d hear is the lonesome train whistle. Except, it wasn’t lonesome at all because there were always dozens of them. The apartment complex was also converting to condos at the time, so the construction around us was constant. I do not miss that place. ---
**Author:** ![MikeG](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mikeg/32/4329_2.png) [@MikeG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MikeG)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2010, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/39 "2010-04-12T23:18:33Z")
I’ve lived through most of these issues at one time or another. My current place: 2 BR in the only unit above a business that closes at 6pm, no neighbors, 8+ parking spots to myself for the most part with a forest preserve across the street for overflow when there’s a party. Laundry is in the kitchen but manageable. Central air is downstairs so nice and quiet. Sure it’s expensive but I have looked for a better place regularly for a year and nothing comes close. The only downside is I’m a block from I-94 but that really does just fade to white noise. ---
**Author:** ![Cardinal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cardinal/32/4000_2.png) [@Cardinal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cardinal)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632/40 "2010-04-14T17:03:29Z")
One apartment was near the highway, but when I visited there during the day the noise just faded into the background for me. I suggest going to a building at night and pretending you are going to sleep as you stand or sit there. Could you deal with that amount of noise? Are there dogs barking that the management didn’t mention? When are the trash bins emptied by the big truck, 5am? Does the train just go past, or is there a crossing that the drivers need/want to blast horns at? Does your neighbor’s shower wake you up every morning? Is there an in-sink garbage disposal? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-you-ignored-while-looking-for-an-apartment-you-shouldnt-have/535632.md?page=3)