The perils and frustrations of the apartment dweller
You know, over the past many years, I've lived in a lot of apartments. I've finally come to the conclusion that it's really damn difficult to predict whether or not your experience with a rental agency or apartment complex will be a positive one, a neutral one, or a wildly negative one. Our apartment complex in Alexandria was, for us, great. A friend of mine moved in two floors above us and had a less-than-stellar experience. On the advice of a co-worker, we moved into the Chantilly apartment - same complex she lived in at the time. She had no problems with them - we had a carnival of bad experiences and still refer to the place as Amityville. We had, more or less, a good relationship with our current leasing company here in Lincoln (rec'd to us by a person who had also had a good experience with them) - to the point that, when we were booted out of our first place, we sought out another building managed by them. But I've just recently been told a couple of horror stories by people who had profoundly negative experiences with the same company.
This musing brought to you by the fact that we just had our walk-through for our old apartment, and we could tell already that the guy was going to be a genuine, class-A dick about some things that truly were there when we moved in. The ledge of the window is very worn and gouged in long parallel rows along the grain, and he clearly intimated that our cats were somehow responsible. Perhaps if we were keeping a lynx, or several small cougars, that might happen. We're crossing our fingers that we wrote down the wear on our initial walk-through form, but we might have made a $300 mistake by not noting it down, since we might have mentally written it off as wear and tear on an apartment that's forty or fifty years old that we didn't need to specifically write down, just like we didn't write down that the cabinets were kinda janky - usable, but janky.
We have to find our copy of the walk-through form from when we moved in, It's around somewhere, I just have to unearth it. But we can just tell this guy is going to do his best to not have to return our deposit, and I don't know if I have the wherewithal right now to take him to small claims court, or whatever would have to happen.
I hate this sort of petty bullshit. I know homeownership brings its own unique sets of problems and issues, but right now, I'd trade.
This musing brought to you by the fact that we just had our walk-through for our old apartment, and we could tell already that the guy was going to be a genuine, class-A dick about some things that truly were there when we moved in. The ledge of the window is very worn and gouged in long parallel rows along the grain, and he clearly intimated that our cats were somehow responsible. Perhaps if we were keeping a lynx, or several small cougars, that might happen. We're crossing our fingers that we wrote down the wear on our initial walk-through form, but we might have made a $300 mistake by not noting it down, since we might have mentally written it off as wear and tear on an apartment that's forty or fifty years old that we didn't need to specifically write down, just like we didn't write down that the cabinets were kinda janky - usable, but janky.
We have to find our copy of the walk-through form from when we moved in, It's around somewhere, I just have to unearth it. But we can just tell this guy is going to do his best to not have to return our deposit, and I don't know if I have the wherewithal right now to take him to small claims court, or whatever would have to happen.
I hate this sort of petty bullshit. I know homeownership brings its own unique sets of problems and issues, but right now, I'd trade.