House Problems (isn't there always?)
It is nice having the girlfriend back again. Life is starting to feel normal again and I'm coming back out of boredom mode.
Aside from that things have been less than amusing around here. For one thing, the heat in our apartment isn't working. Our apartment is heated separately from the rest of the building, the building is fine and our apartment is out. This isn't an entirely new issue, its come up before, the landlord did something and got it working again, temporarily at least. Now its out again.
We had a brief conversation yesterday with our soon to be ex downstairs neighbor, and I guess these things have always been problems. The heat has never worked great and there aren't enough vents in the apartments to heat the whole place (we have vents in the two bedrooms, on one side of the apartment, leaving the kitchen and living room on the other side to heat up real slowly), plus the windows being really drafty. The electricity isn't good, the plumbing isn't great, and it sounded to me like she hasn't been too thrilled over the years with the landlord's response to these issues.
Perhaps Renee and I are still really sore over the horrible experiences with the ghetto dump we recently departed from, but we've been pleased both with the relative lack of problems here and the landlord's prompt response to them (despite that he is currently living across the country and travels back this way every now and then). The electric might suck, but we can plug in more than three things at a time without knocking out the whole house. The plumbing may not be great, but we don't have a foot and a half of water in the tub that won't drain (really good thing, since we have a shallow shower stall now) and hot water that only kicks on when it feels like it. And when we call the landlord he answers us and actually follows through with his promises, unlike those douche bags from before that we were lucky that they'd even take our phone calls, who screamed at us from calling them once (without first finding out what we wanted, just "How dare you call me on a weekend" and hang up) and whom we had to threaten to get them to fix a sewage leak in the basement (which they never cleaned up properly either, though they tried to tell us later they did *whatever*).
Landlord showed up with a space heater for us while he tried to figure out why our heat keeps kicking off. This was when we were first exposed to the not so hot electric set up here (it is an old building, so its kind of understandable). With the space heater plugged in Renee noticed the lights periodically becoming really bright and then dimming again. We had a fan running at night (I need it for the white noise, I know its a horrible pain in the winter and I wish I didn't have to, but I simply can't sleep without it) and the power was fluctuating there too.
Yesterday the kitchen light bulb burned out. I changed the bulb then went to turn the light back on. Nothing happened in the kitchen, but every other light that was currently on in the apartment turned off when I flipped the switch (and turned back on when I flipped it back). Confused, I flipped the switch back and forth a few more times, obviously not a good idea, and that was when the cord on the kitchen lamp starting smoking.
Landlord was here the next day. Going to try and get an electrician to come in and see what is wrong. Since this all started with the space heater, he brought us a different one, one of those Amish hotboxes we've been making fun of on TV. I got to say, as ridiculous as the concept of an electric fireplace is to me, the fucking thing works so much better than the other space heater did, it heats up a room very well and very quickly (and managed to heat up the chains on my neck enough to burn me while I was leaned over it writing a check). And it requires far less power as well.
Its a lot more than what we were used to.
Don't worry, we're doing fine here. Now anyway.
Aside from that things have been less than amusing around here. For one thing, the heat in our apartment isn't working. Our apartment is heated separately from the rest of the building, the building is fine and our apartment is out. This isn't an entirely new issue, its come up before, the landlord did something and got it working again, temporarily at least. Now its out again.
We had a brief conversation yesterday with our soon to be ex downstairs neighbor, and I guess these things have always been problems. The heat has never worked great and there aren't enough vents in the apartments to heat the whole place (we have vents in the two bedrooms, on one side of the apartment, leaving the kitchen and living room on the other side to heat up real slowly), plus the windows being really drafty. The electricity isn't good, the plumbing isn't great, and it sounded to me like she hasn't been too thrilled over the years with the landlord's response to these issues.
Perhaps Renee and I are still really sore over the horrible experiences with the ghetto dump we recently departed from, but we've been pleased both with the relative lack of problems here and the landlord's prompt response to them (despite that he is currently living across the country and travels back this way every now and then). The electric might suck, but we can plug in more than three things at a time without knocking out the whole house. The plumbing may not be great, but we don't have a foot and a half of water in the tub that won't drain (really good thing, since we have a shallow shower stall now) and hot water that only kicks on when it feels like it. And when we call the landlord he answers us and actually follows through with his promises, unlike those douche bags from before that we were lucky that they'd even take our phone calls, who screamed at us from calling them once (without first finding out what we wanted, just "How dare you call me on a weekend" and hang up) and whom we had to threaten to get them to fix a sewage leak in the basement (which they never cleaned up properly either, though they tried to tell us later they did *whatever*).
Landlord showed up with a space heater for us while he tried to figure out why our heat keeps kicking off. This was when we were first exposed to the not so hot electric set up here (it is an old building, so its kind of understandable). With the space heater plugged in Renee noticed the lights periodically becoming really bright and then dimming again. We had a fan running at night (I need it for the white noise, I know its a horrible pain in the winter and I wish I didn't have to, but I simply can't sleep without it) and the power was fluctuating there too.
Yesterday the kitchen light bulb burned out. I changed the bulb then went to turn the light back on. Nothing happened in the kitchen, but every other light that was currently on in the apartment turned off when I flipped the switch (and turned back on when I flipped it back). Confused, I flipped the switch back and forth a few more times, obviously not a good idea, and that was when the cord on the kitchen lamp starting smoking.
Landlord was here the next day. Going to try and get an electrician to come in and see what is wrong. Since this all started with the space heater, he brought us a different one, one of those Amish hotboxes we've been making fun of on TV. I got to say, as ridiculous as the concept of an electric fireplace is to me, the fucking thing works so much better than the other space heater did, it heats up a room very well and very quickly (and managed to heat up the chains on my neck enough to burn me while I was leaned over it writing a check). And it requires far less power as well.
Its a lot more than what we were used to.
Don't worry, we're doing fine here. Now anyway.