Rental regret

Moving is one of my least favorite things to do. There's all the packing, cleaning, destroying of evidence, and hiding funny notes to creep out the next tenant. It's a lot of work.


But when you're talking about moving out of your parents' house to your own place again, the task of moving doesn't seem so bad. I recently accepted a job offer at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine as an Editorial Associate in the Psychology department (which, by the way, I'm very excited about and grateful for, but that's another blog). So now that I have a steady income, I'm looking to move out of my parents house, where I've been staying temporarily for the past 6 months. I'm fortunate and grateful to have had a place to stay as I was going through a transition in my life, but now I need to get the hell out, as soon as possible (I don't really do well living at home, but that's also another blog).


So I'm doing the apartment searching thing, which is nearly as annoying as moving. There's a lot to choose from, and I sometimes have trouble making decisions in my life. For instance, If I'm in the market for shoes, I have to go to every store in town that sells shoes before I can decide on a new pair. After all, what if I found the same pair somewhere else for less money? Or what if the perfect shoes were at the store I didn't go to? Buying new shoes really gives me perspective as to what presidents go through when making an equally important decision, like which country to bomb.


Picking the right apartment is more important even than picking the right pair of shoes. I know from experience. I don't have that high of standards. And I've lived in some nice apartments. But I've also lived in some very shady abodes.


My second apartment in Powell, Wyo., was more like a duplex. It was half of an older house, with a nice room in the attic and a bedroom, large living room and kitchen, all for $230 a month! What a steal, I thought, it had to be too good to be true. Of course, it was. It was mostly fine in the summer, except for when the landlord set up a sprinkler outside the window to water the "grass" (it looked more like that yellow plastic grass people use at Easter). The sprinkler shot water right through the window which I had left open on a hot day, and soaked my bed. Which, of course, left me having to assure my roommate that my sheets were wet because of the sprinkler. Really, it was the sprinkler! I can't help it that Powell's water smells like urine!


Then, once vengeful winter came along with it's freezing temperatures, I realized that the insulation in the walls was thinner than Sarah Palin's resume. So to compensate, we bought some space heaters, because we didn't have to pay for electricity. That led to the fuse being blown. Logically, the fuse box that controlled our side of the house was located in the other half of the house. And our neighbor's hearing was a lot like Alex Rodriguez's explanation for his steroid use: pretty weak. So she couldn't hear our pounding on her door, and we spent a really cold night without heat.


So I was kind of desperate to get out of that apartment. The one that I chose to move into seemed alright. I guess I forgot to check one important aspect when I viewed the place: the shower. I assumed this being after the Great Depression, most bathrooms come equipped with a shower and not just a bath. I assumed wrong.


Instead of a shower fixture, the bathtub had a hookup for a shower-like nozzle that was connected to a hose, but not attached to anything. And for some reason, the tub wasn't up against a wall, so it wasn't like you could just nail it up. So I spent the first six months or so hosing myself off like an animal. I'm used to eating like an animal, smelling like an animal (I wear Squirrel for Men by Calvin Klein, really big with the ladies), but not bathing like an animal.

Most recently, when I moved to Bellingham, Wash., this summer, I lived in a house with two college students. The house was old and a little dingier than I was used to, but overall, it was fine by college house standards. Except for one minor mishap the morning after I moved in: the toilet exploded. No, really. It spewed really gross stuff over the bowl and filled the bathroom with what I can only imagine had to include human feces and urine. The mess was bravely cleaned up by my roommate, but I only used the upstairs toilet from then on (I still have reoccurring toilet-explosion PTD dreams to this day).

How did resolve these apartment-related issues? The way most people do: I wrote columns about them in the newspaper I was working for at the time. That only served to apparently make the elderly owner of the duplex in Powell cry (I guess she didn't realize I'm a humor writer). But it did finally get me a fixture to hang the hose from, so I had something that somewhat resembled a shower.

So whoever rents me my next apartment, you'd be well served to heed my service calls and complaints. Or you might find your property in this blog, to be read by tens of people.