Shana-chan
March 13th, 2007, 03:50 AM
*** My posts are really long winded. So here's an outline: ***
- Flood in our apartment - our fault, we understand and admitted it immediately.
- No one would help - landlady MIA, no plumber, no maintenance man, NOTHING
- Condescending jerk who made me cry who "cleaned" our carpets - really too much of a dick to describe
- Landlady tried to evict us and is charging us for everything
Well, okay I believe it was Thursday night.. My hubby and I had been fighting all day and really upset, tired, exhausted, stressed, and out of it.
We left the house, went food shopping for a couple hours, and when we returned to our little apartment, we walked in to find a freaking rainforest!
One of us had left the bathroom (upstairs) faucet running, and it overflowed! It was leaking down through the ceiling in the living room and kitchen, and had completely soaked the floor in those two rooms and the dining room (was being used as our bedroom).
:twitch: :aburst: :scream: :wah: (Why is there no *beating self viciously over the head* emoticon?)
So (after we turned off the upstairs sink) we called the emergency line. The plumber called us back saying he couldn't help us, and the maintenance man just kept repeating, "cleaning crew can't come out 'til tomorrow."
I called my mom, who calmed me and the hubby down a lot, and started wringing out the kitchen floor, with pots catching the water that was coming down. @_@ When there wasn't 2 inches worth of water on the floor (at midnight), we grabbed what very little money we have and went to the 24 hr Walmart an hour's drive away and bought a Wet/Dry Shop Vac, so that we could finish cleaning the kitchen floor and start sucking up water from the living room floor (so our electronics didn't get destroyed).
God, that sucked. We stayed up until 7am pulling water out of the floor. We were able to buy a 5 gallon Shop Vac, and I emptied it around 6 times, at the LEAST.
We slept... for an hour. In which the "carpet cleaner" called and said he'd be out at 10:30. Cool, he's getting right on it. He sounded nice, I thought everything would be good. I set the clock for 9 and slept for an extra 1/2 hour.
When we got up, we immediately started packing things up and moving them into areas that weren't wet, and that we knew would be out of the way. When the "carpet cleaner" (he's actually a "mildew specialist," supposedly - I'm really doubting it) showed up, we specifically told him to be careful for the BRAND NEW EXPENSIVE (and our very first piece of furniture) dining table that was near the door, away from the water. We informed him that if he gave us about 15 minutes, we'd have it out of his way and he could bring in his equipment. I wasn't being threatening, I was being very friendly for having an hour's worth of sleep.
So, what does he do..? The first thing after he looked around, was that he brought in a dehumidifier... AND SLAMMED IT AGAINST THE SIDE OF OUR TABLE! Despite us asking nicely to be careful. We watched him bring it in, and we said, "WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!" And he said, "I didn't touch it."
..... _wedgie_ :grrrrr:
Okay, so he hasn't been there five minutes, and he's already hurt our table and lied straight faced to us. WTF?!
He tells me to show him where the water was coming from, where it was wet, etc. I start to show him, saying, "Okay, it came down here, and here, and here, and here, as you can see from the discoloration, and the carpet is wet here, here, -" "It doesn't matter where it's wet at! The only thing that matters is MILDEW!"
..... :aburst: I did what he asked me to. I rebutted his statement with, "Yes, I understand that, THIS is where it is wet and where MILDEW will grow." (The word MILDEW will always be capitalized, because I swear he used it 300 times, at least!) He says, "You see, I have to get rid of the MILDEW. Anywhere that's wet, in the walls, in the sheetrock, in the carpet, the pad, the wood, there can be MILDEW." ... "Yes, I understand," "MILDEWMILDEWMILDEW!" It literally did not matter how many times I said 'Yes, I understand you have to get in my closet,' he would not stop talking or listen to me or even REALIZE that I was cleaning out the closet for him so he could get into it.
He tells me, "You're going to need to leave." And I said, "What, excuse me?"
"You're going to HAVE to leave. Well, err, MOST people prefer to leave. It's 'very loud', I'll have two dehumidifiers running and this fan."
Okay, first off... All of those things are only about 2 decibels louder than the AC I use during the summer. Who cares? Not a problem.*
He was VERY condescending. I don't even think I can describe how much of a (intentional or unintentional) condescending *GRRR!* this guy was! Usually things people do or say don't bother my husband, but after talking to this guy for five minutes, he ran upstairs to where I was and said, "What a condescending-!" He NEVER says things like that about people.
The cleaner also refuses to let us say ANYTHING to him. Nothing. I tried to talk to him, to say, 'Okay, well, I want to get this out of the way first, and then we'll finish doing this, just so you'll know where we'll be,' and he wouldn't let me speak. I got to the word 'first' before he suddenly started talking over me. And from that point on, he refuses to let me say anything.
I tried saying, "Look, we've had 1 hour of sleep, and we're working as fast as we can, and considering we've only taken 3 hours of work to move our entire apartment into one room, I think we're doing okay!" And three words in he starts talking over me and WON'T SHUT UP!
Anyways, back to the * above. So he finally got the point that we needed to move everything and he'd have to wait a tiny bit before he started working. Of course, he could have started sucking water out during this time, but he apparently thought we'd be tripping all over his plastic sucky tube. :/ Not our fault. He says, "I'll go get you some boxes, I'll be back soon." Cool.
When he came back, he brought 50 (yes, that's FIFTY!) boxes with him. WTF!??!??!! We used maybe 10 of them. The rest we threw out the next day. He left again, saying he'd be back at 4, but not before saying, "OMG you're going to need more boxes!" "NO! We do NOT need more boxes! Thank you anyways."
He also said, "LISTEN, it's not about YOUR stuff, it's not about the CARPET, it's about the MILDEW!" ... EXCUSE ME?! You're in my HOME. YES, it is about my stuff. I WILL be suing the hell out of you if you putting those short shelves against the GLASS on our TV scratched it, or if you dented our brand freaking new table!
At 4:45 he comes back when we've finished moving everything. Of course, we had finished 45 minutes before when he originally said he'd be back. So we're a little pissed, but we brush it off since we had to take a little time to move our things out of the other rooms and etc..
At this point, he finally asks if we have a place to go. Excuse me? You're at a LOW INCOME APARTMENT COMPLEX. Do you understand the part that says LOW INCOME?! That means we have no hotel to go to. No, we can't go to our friend's house, they live in their parents' basement. What's that? Our family? That's a laugh.
I guess he got it through his head that we weren't going anywhere. I tried to explain to him that we'd just be in the office and wouldn't be in the way, and if he needs anything to let us know, but.. he talked over me and completely ignored me. So, whatever. At that point I refused to talk to him ever again. ):
So he works, sucks up some water, pulls up some carpets and pads, puts up a fan and an extra dehumidifier and leaves. Next day? He sprays some disinfectant and moves the fans a little. That's Saturday. He says he'll be back later that day, and he leaves. And doesn't come back, or call, until this morning (Monday) at around 10:30.
Ooookay... It would have been nice to know that you were going to ditch us the rest of the weekend. That part of the carpet the fan has been on for 36 hours was dry 3 hours after you left it there. You couldn't come by for two seconds to move it to the wet part of that carpet, or call us to do it for you? Of course not.
He hasn't been upstairs to check the bathroom floor or the other 'wet' room since the very first day he was here. He also didn't get rid of all the padding that was wet in the first place. At this point, he STILL hasn't cut the ceiling open to get that to start drying.
Today he showed up for about two minutes, stuck some tubes into some holes he drilled (because he doesn't want to pull the fridge out. He told the landlady that we would 'trip all over it'. No, we wouldn't. We wouldn't leave the house, as we don't have anywhere to GO with no money), and FINALLY put something on the wet part of the carpet, which has been wet since Thursday/Friday.
Which, actually, he was going to let AIRDRY until my husband told him it was starting to stink like mildew and that he needed to freaking do what we're going to be paying him to do.
So this morning, bright and early, we went down and talked to the landlady. She was going to evict us because we have our bed in the "dining room." We honestly did not know it was against our lease. The lease only seems to explain what a 'bedroom' is and what overcrowding is, not that we can't have our bed there (at least, from my point of view, it needs to be reworded):
Overcrowding shall occur when the TOTAL occupancy level in a housing unit exceeds 2 people per habitable sleeping room, except that an additional person(s) may be allowed when a habitable sleeping room provides at least 50 square feet per person. A habitable sleeping room shall not include a kitchen, bathroom, hallway, or dining room.
Joy.
The other things that happened when we talked to the landlady:
- She talked over us and refused to let us say anything, until she was making a call on her cellphone and I told her that I deserved to defend myself.
- The "carpet cleaner" LIED to her and told her that; we actually used 50 boxes for the things we had in our apartment, and that our apartment looked like a storage facility. WE JUST HAD A FLOOD IN OUR APARTMENT!!! OF COURSE EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE SHOVED TO ONE SIDE AWAY FROM THE WATER, AND THE OTHER ROOMS ARE GOING TO BE DISHEVELED! He also said that our stairs "had a layer of dust and looked like they had never been vacuumed." 1) We vacuum the entire house once a month, and weekly depending on what's needed. 2) WE JUST HAD A FLOOD! We were running around the apartment in our god damned shoes, you moron! OF COURSE THE STAIRS ARE GOING TO BE DIRTY! The house is not going to be damn prestine after a freaking FLOOD!
- She said we'd have to pay for everything.
- She wanted to yell, 'WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!' at us, but instead did her best to make us feel like idiots, along with insinuating that we flooded the place on purpose. "What the hell would possess you to turn on the water and then leave?" IT WAS A FREAKING ACCIDENT! She said something else that I really feel was completely out of line. ): We're not stupid, it was an accident, for crying out loud. We didn't want any of our things to get ruined. We didn't do it just to piss you off. "You must have been very embarrassed or very stupid to admit that it was your fault right away." Uhmm, how about truthful? How about we're actually the only honest people in this entire state? Did that ever occur to you?
- She STILL hasn't come out to see our apartment. D: So no matter what happens, she's just going to take the "carpet cleaner's" word over ours. Even though he's a liar, a condescending jerk, and pretty much very stupid.
God.. yes, that's it so far.. I'm really pissed that everyone is treating us like idiots because of something that was an accident, that we couldn't help, that we did EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER to try to help clean up, including NOT being arseholes to the cleaning guy, despite him being a total anus to us. ): No one is helping, they're just sort of treating us like crap. ):
I've been told that if the apartment is inhabitable (which it is), then they're supposed to put us into a hotel. -_-; Instead, we're squeezed into a tiny part of our office that's about 5x3 feet. About the width of a twin bed, but not as long. That's the floor, and is currently our bed. ):
Scary thing; at any time between last Thursday and this Sunday, the landlady could kick us out, due to the terms in the lease. D: So we're trying not to start anything or be mean to anyone. ): It's really scary not knowing what's going on, or what's going to happen, since no one will talk to us. Not to mention that I've currently lost 25 hours of work this week (it was $8 per hour, too!), when I was scheduled for 50. ): That means that on top of this bill, assuming everything is finished tomorrow (it won't be), I will only have 1/2 of what I expected for this week. I had to take a lot of last week off, too, so the next two paychecks will be MUCH lower than I expect. D: God..
I'm really scared, really tired, really stressed out, really just wanting my bed back. ):
For those who have now finished reading my epic story, thank you. :hugz:
- Flood in our apartment - our fault, we understand and admitted it immediately.
- No one would help - landlady MIA, no plumber, no maintenance man, NOTHING
- Condescending jerk who made me cry who "cleaned" our carpets - really too much of a dick to describe
- Landlady tried to evict us and is charging us for everything
Well, okay I believe it was Thursday night.. My hubby and I had been fighting all day and really upset, tired, exhausted, stressed, and out of it.
We left the house, went food shopping for a couple hours, and when we returned to our little apartment, we walked in to find a freaking rainforest!
One of us had left the bathroom (upstairs) faucet running, and it overflowed! It was leaking down through the ceiling in the living room and kitchen, and had completely soaked the floor in those two rooms and the dining room (was being used as our bedroom).
:twitch: :aburst: :scream: :wah: (Why is there no *beating self viciously over the head* emoticon?)
So (after we turned off the upstairs sink) we called the emergency line. The plumber called us back saying he couldn't help us, and the maintenance man just kept repeating, "cleaning crew can't come out 'til tomorrow."
I called my mom, who calmed me and the hubby down a lot, and started wringing out the kitchen floor, with pots catching the water that was coming down. @_@ When there wasn't 2 inches worth of water on the floor (at midnight), we grabbed what very little money we have and went to the 24 hr Walmart an hour's drive away and bought a Wet/Dry Shop Vac, so that we could finish cleaning the kitchen floor and start sucking up water from the living room floor (so our electronics didn't get destroyed).
God, that sucked. We stayed up until 7am pulling water out of the floor. We were able to buy a 5 gallon Shop Vac, and I emptied it around 6 times, at the LEAST.
We slept... for an hour. In which the "carpet cleaner" called and said he'd be out at 10:30. Cool, he's getting right on it. He sounded nice, I thought everything would be good. I set the clock for 9 and slept for an extra 1/2 hour.
When we got up, we immediately started packing things up and moving them into areas that weren't wet, and that we knew would be out of the way. When the "carpet cleaner" (he's actually a "mildew specialist," supposedly - I'm really doubting it) showed up, we specifically told him to be careful for the BRAND NEW EXPENSIVE (and our very first piece of furniture) dining table that was near the door, away from the water. We informed him that if he gave us about 15 minutes, we'd have it out of his way and he could bring in his equipment. I wasn't being threatening, I was being very friendly for having an hour's worth of sleep.
So, what does he do..? The first thing after he looked around, was that he brought in a dehumidifier... AND SLAMMED IT AGAINST THE SIDE OF OUR TABLE! Despite us asking nicely to be careful. We watched him bring it in, and we said, "WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!" And he said, "I didn't touch it."
..... _wedgie_ :grrrrr:
Okay, so he hasn't been there five minutes, and he's already hurt our table and lied straight faced to us. WTF?!
He tells me to show him where the water was coming from, where it was wet, etc. I start to show him, saying, "Okay, it came down here, and here, and here, and here, as you can see from the discoloration, and the carpet is wet here, here, -" "It doesn't matter where it's wet at! The only thing that matters is MILDEW!"
..... :aburst: I did what he asked me to. I rebutted his statement with, "Yes, I understand that, THIS is where it is wet and where MILDEW will grow." (The word MILDEW will always be capitalized, because I swear he used it 300 times, at least!) He says, "You see, I have to get rid of the MILDEW. Anywhere that's wet, in the walls, in the sheetrock, in the carpet, the pad, the wood, there can be MILDEW." ... "Yes, I understand," "MILDEWMILDEWMILDEW!" It literally did not matter how many times I said 'Yes, I understand you have to get in my closet,' he would not stop talking or listen to me or even REALIZE that I was cleaning out the closet for him so he could get into it.
He tells me, "You're going to need to leave." And I said, "What, excuse me?"
"You're going to HAVE to leave. Well, err, MOST people prefer to leave. It's 'very loud', I'll have two dehumidifiers running and this fan."
Okay, first off... All of those things are only about 2 decibels louder than the AC I use during the summer. Who cares? Not a problem.*
He was VERY condescending. I don't even think I can describe how much of a (intentional or unintentional) condescending *GRRR!* this guy was! Usually things people do or say don't bother my husband, but after talking to this guy for five minutes, he ran upstairs to where I was and said, "What a condescending-!" He NEVER says things like that about people.
The cleaner also refuses to let us say ANYTHING to him. Nothing. I tried to talk to him, to say, 'Okay, well, I want to get this out of the way first, and then we'll finish doing this, just so you'll know where we'll be,' and he wouldn't let me speak. I got to the word 'first' before he suddenly started talking over me. And from that point on, he refuses to let me say anything.
I tried saying, "Look, we've had 1 hour of sleep, and we're working as fast as we can, and considering we've only taken 3 hours of work to move our entire apartment into one room, I think we're doing okay!" And three words in he starts talking over me and WON'T SHUT UP!
Anyways, back to the * above. So he finally got the point that we needed to move everything and he'd have to wait a tiny bit before he started working. Of course, he could have started sucking water out during this time, but he apparently thought we'd be tripping all over his plastic sucky tube. :/ Not our fault. He says, "I'll go get you some boxes, I'll be back soon." Cool.
When he came back, he brought 50 (yes, that's FIFTY!) boxes with him. WTF!??!??!! We used maybe 10 of them. The rest we threw out the next day. He left again, saying he'd be back at 4, but not before saying, "OMG you're going to need more boxes!" "NO! We do NOT need more boxes! Thank you anyways."
He also said, "LISTEN, it's not about YOUR stuff, it's not about the CARPET, it's about the MILDEW!" ... EXCUSE ME?! You're in my HOME. YES, it is about my stuff. I WILL be suing the hell out of you if you putting those short shelves against the GLASS on our TV scratched it, or if you dented our brand freaking new table!
At 4:45 he comes back when we've finished moving everything. Of course, we had finished 45 minutes before when he originally said he'd be back. So we're a little pissed, but we brush it off since we had to take a little time to move our things out of the other rooms and etc..
At this point, he finally asks if we have a place to go. Excuse me? You're at a LOW INCOME APARTMENT COMPLEX. Do you understand the part that says LOW INCOME?! That means we have no hotel to go to. No, we can't go to our friend's house, they live in their parents' basement. What's that? Our family? That's a laugh.
I guess he got it through his head that we weren't going anywhere. I tried to explain to him that we'd just be in the office and wouldn't be in the way, and if he needs anything to let us know, but.. he talked over me and completely ignored me. So, whatever. At that point I refused to talk to him ever again. ):
So he works, sucks up some water, pulls up some carpets and pads, puts up a fan and an extra dehumidifier and leaves. Next day? He sprays some disinfectant and moves the fans a little. That's Saturday. He says he'll be back later that day, and he leaves. And doesn't come back, or call, until this morning (Monday) at around 10:30.
Ooookay... It would have been nice to know that you were going to ditch us the rest of the weekend. That part of the carpet the fan has been on for 36 hours was dry 3 hours after you left it there. You couldn't come by for two seconds to move it to the wet part of that carpet, or call us to do it for you? Of course not.
He hasn't been upstairs to check the bathroom floor or the other 'wet' room since the very first day he was here. He also didn't get rid of all the padding that was wet in the first place. At this point, he STILL hasn't cut the ceiling open to get that to start drying.
Today he showed up for about two minutes, stuck some tubes into some holes he drilled (because he doesn't want to pull the fridge out. He told the landlady that we would 'trip all over it'. No, we wouldn't. We wouldn't leave the house, as we don't have anywhere to GO with no money), and FINALLY put something on the wet part of the carpet, which has been wet since Thursday/Friday.
Which, actually, he was going to let AIRDRY until my husband told him it was starting to stink like mildew and that he needed to freaking do what we're going to be paying him to do.
So this morning, bright and early, we went down and talked to the landlady. She was going to evict us because we have our bed in the "dining room." We honestly did not know it was against our lease. The lease only seems to explain what a 'bedroom' is and what overcrowding is, not that we can't have our bed there (at least, from my point of view, it needs to be reworded):
Overcrowding shall occur when the TOTAL occupancy level in a housing unit exceeds 2 people per habitable sleeping room, except that an additional person(s) may be allowed when a habitable sleeping room provides at least 50 square feet per person. A habitable sleeping room shall not include a kitchen, bathroom, hallway, or dining room.
Joy.
The other things that happened when we talked to the landlady:
- She talked over us and refused to let us say anything, until she was making a call on her cellphone and I told her that I deserved to defend myself.
- The "carpet cleaner" LIED to her and told her that; we actually used 50 boxes for the things we had in our apartment, and that our apartment looked like a storage facility. WE JUST HAD A FLOOD IN OUR APARTMENT!!! OF COURSE EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE SHOVED TO ONE SIDE AWAY FROM THE WATER, AND THE OTHER ROOMS ARE GOING TO BE DISHEVELED! He also said that our stairs "had a layer of dust and looked like they had never been vacuumed." 1) We vacuum the entire house once a month, and weekly depending on what's needed. 2) WE JUST HAD A FLOOD! We were running around the apartment in our god damned shoes, you moron! OF COURSE THE STAIRS ARE GOING TO BE DIRTY! The house is not going to be damn prestine after a freaking FLOOD!
- She said we'd have to pay for everything.
- She wanted to yell, 'WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!' at us, but instead did her best to make us feel like idiots, along with insinuating that we flooded the place on purpose. "What the hell would possess you to turn on the water and then leave?" IT WAS A FREAKING ACCIDENT! She said something else that I really feel was completely out of line. ): We're not stupid, it was an accident, for crying out loud. We didn't want any of our things to get ruined. We didn't do it just to piss you off. "You must have been very embarrassed or very stupid to admit that it was your fault right away." Uhmm, how about truthful? How about we're actually the only honest people in this entire state? Did that ever occur to you?
- She STILL hasn't come out to see our apartment. D: So no matter what happens, she's just going to take the "carpet cleaner's" word over ours. Even though he's a liar, a condescending jerk, and pretty much very stupid.
God.. yes, that's it so far.. I'm really pissed that everyone is treating us like idiots because of something that was an accident, that we couldn't help, that we did EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER to try to help clean up, including NOT being arseholes to the cleaning guy, despite him being a total anus to us. ): No one is helping, they're just sort of treating us like crap. ):
I've been told that if the apartment is inhabitable (which it is), then they're supposed to put us into a hotel. -_-; Instead, we're squeezed into a tiny part of our office that's about 5x3 feet. About the width of a twin bed, but not as long. That's the floor, and is currently our bed. ):
Scary thing; at any time between last Thursday and this Sunday, the landlady could kick us out, due to the terms in the lease. D: So we're trying not to start anything or be mean to anyone. ): It's really scary not knowing what's going on, or what's going to happen, since no one will talk to us. Not to mention that I've currently lost 25 hours of work this week (it was $8 per hour, too!), when I was scheduled for 50. ): That means that on top of this bill, assuming everything is finished tomorrow (it won't be), I will only have 1/2 of what I expected for this week. I had to take a lot of last week off, too, so the next two paychecks will be MUCH lower than I expect. D: God..
I'm really scared, really tired, really stressed out, really just wanting my bed back. ):
For those who have now finished reading my epic story, thank you. :hugz: