I recently moved into an old trailer in order to save money, and it’s a pretty crummy place. In an effort to make it seem less so, I got to thinking about horrid places I have lived in the past, which made me realize this place isn’t the worst by far, and it made me curious about others experiences.
So tell me, what was the worst place you’ve lived?
For me, it was a garage that wasn’t attached to anything, as the house it went with had been torn down years prior. The glass from the windows were gone, the door was gone, and the floor was dirt. In an effort to afford us a little more protection from the elements, my mom hung heavy blankets over the windows and doorways.
For us kids, our method of bathing involved filling up one of those shallow kiddy pools from Wal-Mart and bathing in it. My mom hung a water hose over a tree branch and showered under that.
Our stove consisted of an oven rack laid across 2 cinder blocks with a fire underneath. This was also our main source of heat and light. I don’t remember how we used to store food, as there was no electricity, and I don’t recall a fridge or any cabinets.
For a year or so when I was in college, I lived in an unfinished basement apartment. Yes, cement floor, concrete block walls, lots of pipes. And to make matters worse, there was a plumbing problem that caused waste from the rest of the house to rise up in my bathtub and spill over onto the floor. Then the landlord began stealing my meager possessions.
We just moved out of it in June. It was a single wide, 1950s era trailer in the Las Vegas ghetto. I rented it in order to get out of a bad relationship 9 years ago and it’s primary advantages were that it was cheap and the landlady (who was very, very nice and decent at least) didn’t care that I had a bunch of dogs and two cats.
We had rocks thrown in the front window and my truck got keyed when I parked it on the street to avoid a mountain of pigeon crap that occurred if I parked in the driveway. The roof leaked, ALOT, getting into the wiring and towards the end we were convinced the place was going to burn down over our heads. There was an addition of three rooms built onto it but it was really just slapped together without a lot of thought. In the two west rooms, there were no a/c vents at all. This is on the hottest part of the house in the Las Vegas, 110 plus degree summers. We had $350/month summer power bills in a house that couldn’t manage to get under 85 degrees on a mild summer day. We should have moved years ago but when we were ready, we both got hit with layoffs.
Now, I live in a tiny stick-built house in my hometown near Vegas. We freeze in the summer and when it rains, we don’t have to scramble around with strategically placed pots. It’s paradise.
My first place was pretty shitty, a basement apartment. Dingy. The kitchen had no oven - we were rovided with a plug-in tabletop range - but it did have a great big bump in the middle of the floor where a tree root was trying to grow into our apartment. I was also blessed with an awful roommate who wore these leather slippers and when he walked around it’d make this fwip-fwip sound that drove you insane.
A garret apartment in Italy. It was furnished, but poorly… I stacked the two wafer-thin mattresses from the twin beds together, to make one workable bed. The bathroom had a tub with a shower attachment but no place to hang the attachment and no curtain; I had to mop the whole floor every time I washed my hair because I couldn’t manage to keep the water in the tub. There was no laundry available to me and the nearest laundromat was 1.5 miles away with no public transport line (and no dryers anyhow). I washed my clothes in a soup pot on the stove.
I had no fan and no idea where to buy one. In the end of my time there (I was there for a summer) the outside temperatures reached 100 degrees. I don’t know how hot it was in my apartment, but I spent my waking time there sitting in a cold bath reading.
It wasn’t so awfully bad, except for the laundry thing… and the loneliness thing. I had no one to talk to. People at work wouldn’t socialize with me. There was no internet in my apartment (obviously) and I was behind a heavy firewall at work that made it impossible to use chat programs. I was there alone. I hated it.
The first room is about the size of a queen sized bed, with three doors. This means you can’t actually put any furniture or actually spend any time in it. The second is exactly the size of a queen sized bed- i kept my queen sized bed in there. Neither of these rooms have any windows, although they have these kind of baffling windows in to each other. It’s like living in a tiny bizarre version of the Winchester mystery house. The third room was large enough for a fold-out futon and a desk- this is where I spent most of my tine. It had a tiny window about a foot long. This looked out on a screened balcony that got no light. Essentially, I got no light ever- which is ultra-depressing in a city that only got about 10 hours of sunshine a month (this is a real statistic!)
The kitchen was a small four foot long balcony on the other end. We are talking about a small hallway that you can touch with both hands. This had a tiny sink and a plug-in stovetop, and otherwise not even enough space to chop an onion. On the other end of this was a terrifying semi-outdoor room with a toilet, and a different, oddly spacious, room with one stark showerhead.
The entire place was furnished with broken hand-me-downs. My “dinnerware” was rusty metal trays from the dining hall and a pile of pilfered disposable chopsticks. This was all I could get- my room was supposed to be furnished, and my salary did not account for purchases.
And oh, the cold. It got down to freezing pretty often in the winter, and there was no heating at all. In fact, the fakey no-light windows didn’t even really close (which is good, because the gas leaked) and the whole place was cold, souless cinderblock.
Horrible, useless place. I thought China was all about Feng Shui. Ha! It was bad enough alone- I knew people who had whole families in the same unit!
Student apartments near the University of Arizona. The apartments were multiple-occupant, but with individual leases. The one I lived in was a 3-bedroom with a common room. The apartment had a front door plus doors to each individual room to allow for privacy. When I first moved in, I thought that was pretty awesome.
Then one of the other tenants moved out, leaving one room empty. Because our leases only extended to the common area and our individual rooms, we weren’t allowed to use the empty room for anything, and management locked it so we couldn’t get in from the hallway. Fair enough, right?
Problem is, they still had a cleaning service come in every so often to check on the room and make sure it looked nice in case another tenant came along. I was never able to find out if the cleaning service did it intentionally or not, but when they left the empty room they would leave the door to the outside unlocked. And, of course, the door connecting the room to the hallway could be unlocked from the room.
We got robbed twice in that apartment. It was pretty trivial for burglars to wander around checking doors, find the unlocked one, and wander in to take whatever they pleased. My roommate tried to stay secure by locking his hallway door when he was out; one time the burglars just kicked the stupid thing in.
Alot is sympathetic, but unsure where he comes into this.
I’m not sure which was my worst place- one option was a single room I lived in in Manchester, England, for a month. The actual house specs were OK, but the landlord was not. He had advertised for a housemate: he did not want a housemate. He wanted a domestic servant/prostitute. It was somewhat uncomfortable, to say the least, and when he realised I had no intention of becoming either of those things for him, he threw me out.
The other was the Angry Vegan house, which I may have mentioned before on here- 3 not housetrained dogs, one of which bit, and one silly bitch owner, who did things like go out for a few hours, leaving the dogs at home, and coming back 2 days later. She went mental at me for crimes such as drinking milk, despite advertising the house as ‘Vegetarian/Vegan’, and while I am vegetarian, you will prize my cheese from my cold, dead hands. The whole house stank of dog crap by the time I managed to get out. Her ex-boyfriend had keys, and just used to randomly bring his friends round- including inviting an entire band to sleep over in the living room, just outside my bedroom, the night before my early morning shift at my new job. My friends were not allowed round, in case they scared the dogs. The sad thing was, (apart from her treatment of her dogs; I’m sure they would have been fine with someone else, but she encouraged aggression and bad behaviour), the house would have been really nice in other circumstances. It was a decent, convenient area, nice layout, friendly easy going landlady, who didn’t bother checking up on the place for years at a time…
Not as bad as the others in this thread, but I lived in an apartment with three other guys that had no hot water and no heat. We had to fill up an electric bucket thing to take a shower and we all bought ski masks to sleep in because it was so cold at night. I was lucky, though, one of my roommates had his bed right next to the window which was repaired with cardboard and duck tape. You could hear the wind whistling through it.
We would wake up freezing, run and plug in the shower box (filled with water the night previous), and run back to bed for a half hour while the water heated up. Once my roommate (of the cardboard and duck tape window) woke up late and didn’t have time to let the water heat up. We could all hear his screams as he showered.
Bonus: the bathroom’s only window was in the shower, a huge one set about one foot above the floor and extending five or six feet up. Fortunately the street it looked out on was pretty deserted because you could see everything.
I once lived in a really bad part of town, though the apartment building was really, really nice, clean and beautiful (it was like a shiny gem within a garbage heap).
There were run down buildings on all sides of me, constant car exhaust noise, horns and yelling from all over.
There was a single family house behind me that had family parties all day Saturday and Sunday of every weekend. There’d be like 5 or more families with tons of kids (little girls screaming non stop) partying away with music and BBQ. Each person wasn’t all that loud, but taken together it was deafening.
There was also the building next to me, with a father and son team who would collect bottles and cans throughout the city, then get home, get drunk and fight with their girlfriends.
Oh, and there was also the homeless brother of my downstairs neighbor who would get drunk and sleep in the stairwell.
The area was pretty nasty, but again, the building was awesome and had lots of character.
There was a point when my kids were young that we were out of propane for an extended period and had to take unheated showers. We called it “Taking the Ice Challenge” and the only consolation for the person in the shower was to scream bloody murder. In the living room, the other two would look at each other wide-eyed, knowing that their turn would come soon enough…
We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, half the floor was missing, and we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
Right now, as we speak, I live in a tiny basement apartment. Half the basement is taken up by the unfurnished storage room, so really, I live in half of a basement. I have no real kitchen–instead, I have a sink, a double hot plate, and a toaster oven that works about 60% of the time. The bedroom is constantly about 15 C and the favourite haunt of big black spiders and the occasional centipede. The “great room,” which is my living room slash office, is mostly taken up by a gigantic slate-topped pool table, which is so huge that the house was actually built around it, since there is no way to remove it from the house without tearing out the stairs. (I use it as the world’s most expensive end table.) Once the ground freezes, the entire apartment will be like living in a chest freezer. Also, the world’s most energetic hellion four-year-old lives upstairs, and his primary mode of locomotion is running, and his primary method of communication is screaming.
But it’s wicked cheap, and the water pressure in the shower is fantastic. And laundry is free, even if my kitchen is taken up with the washer and dryer. And even though my fridge is technically in the storage room, and I have a shelf instead of any real cabinetry, I manage somehow.
An apartment – second floor of a house, the owners lived downstairs. The apartment was okay, but the owners went to Florida for the winter. The thermostat was in their part of the house. They turned the heat down when they left, and we moved out in December.
They also had a dog that humped my leg all the time.
I was thrilled when I could move out to 13th Bay St, Norfolk Va. Remember that news piece in the mid 80s, the navy guy killed his wife and stashed her in the bathtub for a month? That was the building I was backed up to. The bikers that lived in the house across the street sold recreational pharmaceuticals and shot the street lights and electrical transformers out for fun, and any time I went for a walk, I was asked if I was a lady of negotiable virtue and what my price was.
You see, when you have to walk on eggshells because you don’t know when anything you might do will trigger a beating, the most beautiful condo becomes a gilded hellhole.
