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DirtyDirtyVagrant
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I'll be moving into one of three apartments soon.
One is really nice but it's in a shitty neighborhood and I would have to take a bus to get groceries or do anything.
One is really nice but also kind of expensive and a little out of the way/off the public transit lines, which means I'd have to walk to get groceries or do anything (or ride a bike, but I haven't bought that bike yet).
And one is basically a total (inexpensive) shithole - in a beautiful neighborhood with parks, trees and expansive lawns, a great deli right next door, a health food shop across the street, a GNC type store up the way, a big grocery store like three blocks away, a gym, a nearby bike trail that stretches and branches all over the county, and so forth and so on. Seriously love the neighborhood.
I'm probably going to pick the third option, because seriously, my every need in walking distance.
My questions are pertaining to the condition of this apartment.
Is there anything I can do to clean, sanitize, and deodorize carpeting and walls? This is like a 100+ year old building and I seriously don't think that the flooring or the wallpaper has ever changed. It's so old that I'll bet the walls are plaster and lathe. Or maybe the guy who last lived in the unit I saw was just a slob. The walls are smoke stained and the room has a musty odor, like some guy just spent the last years of his life in there burning two packs a day until he finally died watching the game show network.
In the case of the smoke staining, is there anything I can do short of sanding and painting the walls? If it comes to that, is that something that I can reasonably suggest to my landlord? How would one petition for such a thing?
I also want to consider the possibility of pests being a problem.
Bugs. Roaches. And by extension, spiders. How can I minimize them? Identify points of entry? Are there chemical deterrents? I've heard that roaches and spiders are incredibly adaptive to such things. I don't have pets and I don't see myself having any in the near future, so anything short of full-on fumigation is an option I think. I'm pretty sure they aren't allowed anyway under the lease. It might also be worth mentioning that the open room is just below ground level.
One is really nice but it's in a shitty neighborhood and I would have to take a bus to get groceries or do anything.
One is really nice but also kind of expensive and a little out of the way/off the public transit lines, which means I'd have to walk to get groceries or do anything (or ride a bike, but I haven't bought that bike yet).
And one is basically a total (inexpensive) shithole - in a beautiful neighborhood with parks, trees and expansive lawns, a great deli right next door, a health food shop across the street, a GNC type store up the way, a big grocery store like three blocks away, a gym, a nearby bike trail that stretches and branches all over the county, and so forth and so on. Seriously love the neighborhood.
I'm probably going to pick the third option, because seriously, my every need in walking distance.
My questions are pertaining to the condition of this apartment.
Is there anything I can do to clean, sanitize, and deodorize carpeting and walls? This is like a 100+ year old building and I seriously don't think that the flooring or the wallpaper has ever changed. It's so old that I'll bet the walls are plaster and lathe. Or maybe the guy who last lived in the unit I saw was just a slob. The walls are smoke stained and the room has a musty odor, like some guy just spent the last years of his life in there burning two packs a day until he finally died watching the game show network.
In the case of the smoke staining, is there anything I can do short of sanding and painting the walls? If it comes to that, is that something that I can reasonably suggest to my landlord? How would one petition for such a thing?
I also want to consider the possibility of pests being a problem.
Bugs. Roaches. And by extension, spiders. How can I minimize them? Identify points of entry? Are there chemical deterrents? I've heard that roaches and spiders are incredibly adaptive to such things. I don't have pets and I don't see myself having any in the near future, so anything short of full-on fumigation is an option I think. I'm pretty sure they aren't allowed anyway under the lease. It might also be worth mentioning that the open room is just below ground level.
DirtyDirtyVagrant on
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My building is 100 years old and I haven't seen as much as an ant in it.
Bug wise, keep your stuff clean. Don't leave food out, clean up any spills etc... That should keep the pest bugs down (though stashing roach motels doesn't hurt either). With the pest bugs kept to a minimum, spiders shouldn't be too interested in taking up residence.
If the place is already infested, get some bugbombs before you move in. Search for points of entry and spray them down with bug killer. You should be able to find some that works to set up a barrier. Any holes that you find can be filled with silicone sealant.
Any permanent changes you plan on doing should be run by the landlord first. They may be willing to help you out with it. Or, if they're dicks, may decide that the changes are worth you losing your security deposit over.
I had to ask about the smoke stains though because I used to work as a painter and we'd do interiors and every time we did one like this the stains would literally leech through the other side of the paint. We ended up just sanding and repainting every time. I didn't know that they had special paint. That's awesome.
I've personally used the acrylic and it worked super awesome on a remodeling job after a huge flood/ resulting mold infestation.
Keels the whole place, paint over top once its dry.
All better.
Talk to your landlord - be friendly. Ask about capital improvements - improvements that you can make and either share in the cost or take it off the rent. He/she gets your free labor, you get home improvements. Gotta work the negotiation skills.
Then it's a combination of keeping the place tidy and being fucking militant with a can of bug spray every time you see one.
With the paint suggest that he pays for the paint first. It may end up with you paying for half of it or something. But he might be willing if you ask straight up. But if you let him make the first offer it's harder for you to maneuver. Also get the agreement in writing.
Also check with the hardware shop about the paint, you can have some trouble if you seal both sides of brickwork with an acrylic paint, I'm not sure about plaster.
Satans..... hints.....
Alternatively, you could ask your landlord to pitch in half the cost of what you plan to have done (repainting is expensive and/or time consuming).
If you paint yourself, plan to take about a day every 2 rooms or so. You'll be priming + painting, so that's fairly realistic (taping, priming, painting, taking off tape). This will get rid of the smell on the walls right away, but you've still got the cieling to worry about, and they are the most annoying things in the fucking WORLD to paint.
A carpet cleaner will only do so much for the floors, but if you go that route go for steam cleaning instead of shampooing. So much more effective. Unfortunately, there is a chance the stains/odours have gone into the floor underneath and/or the carpet pad. In that case, you're pretty much boned.
Bottom line, if you plan on taking this place it's going to cost you a lot of time and money, and the smells may not even be gone completely. It's an outcome to consider.
It sounds like one of those situations where people purchase fixer-upper homes and go bankrupt / become depressed after having to deal with it day in and day out. Unless this is the end of a very long and exhaustive apartment search, I wouldn't settle for anything just yet.
If it is just one slob I bet you would have more negotiating room with the landlord because they are going to want to get that unit back up to the standard of the other units.
I've looked at two other apartments besides the ones in the OP and the situation is pretty much the same. I'm thinking that the reason this is happening is because of the price of the room. Or maybe because there's a college nearby. Or something. That doesn't really make a lot of sense I guess.
That's my situation now. The location is awesome, but the house is in awful condition and the landlord refuses to fix anything. And I bet he'll have it rented out to the next batch of whippersnappers before we've even started packing once the lease is up.
The options are either find somewhere else, or deal with the bad in return for the sweet location.
You'll have to talk to the landlord to find out the details.
not sure if it still exists or caught on, but i remember seeing ads for a paint that had maybe arm and hammer deoderizing agent blended into it. maybe that would help.
found it: http://dutchboy.com/products/interior/wall/paints/refresh/
Yeah, you can ask. Do it in a written letter. But, if you're in a shithole, it's probably a shithole for a reason. He won't wanna clean it up.
Check your lease. If it's permitted, bug bomb the shit out of the place and don't air it out for a couple of days. Everything will die. If it's not, call a professional. After that, don't leave out food, garbage, or anything like that, and you shouldn't have bug problems. They won't be there if there's nothing to eat.
The best thing you can do is replace all the carpeting. That will also get rid of a lot of bugs by default.
We had a roach infestation when we moved in (landlord forgot to mention it, or remedy it) and I put a barrier of boric acid around the kitchen. Worked like a charm.
Apart from that, old and badly maintained buildings gets depressing in very subtle ways that living in a properly built building won't.
It's also likely that the building has all kinds of entry points for invasive beetles and mice.
Also, consider this. If the landlord is shamelessly showing you the place in this condition, imagine what he isn't telling you/how he's going to be to deal with once he has your balls nailed to a lease.
I mean, if I gotta hear my neighbor coughing/fucking in stereo, then it's a problem. If I hear his TV sometimes, whatever.
Actually, if there's a college nearby and the landlord is used to renting to students, the situation makes an awful lot of sense. Students are - and I'm generalizing here - just about the worst kind of tenants, and landlords that deal with them correspondingly turn into the worst kind of landlords. There's no point - and no profit - in cleaning up an apartment to normal, human standards when your typical tenant is going to have unreported roommates, be late with the rent, and probably trash the place before moving out, with no notice and no forwarding address, breaking the lease as they do so.
Wow, that turned into more of a rant than I intended. I'll include a disclaimer here; I AM a college student and am making sweeping generalizations based on limited, anecdotal observation. Your results may vary. Not applicable in all states. Etc.
Anyway, if the building is close to a school and caters to students, I'd keep looking. Find yourself a landlord who's not quite so burned out.
No exceptions.
/in a great building...next to the ghetto. I want to kill myself whenever I step outside.
The third option is the one I'd suggest you go for. The externalities are what really make a place.
I live in a city with a lot of old buildings and I prefer to live in them. They're well built, and I like steam heat. Bugs or whatever are a problem anywhere you aren't ten floors up or more, and even then if you have ten floors of slobs below, it's gonna be a problem.
If you're going to paint, use primer. Every. Fucking. Time.
It seals in whatever you can't wash off, and it makes your new paint stick better and often saves you an extra coat or two, annnnnnd costs waaaaay (sorry I've been drinking) less than an extra bucket of paint. Prime, prime, prime.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
I chose option number 3, but as I was coming in to pay the deposit, the lady was like, "You know, we have another room on the 4th floor that will be ready by the first."
All new walls. New flooring. New cabinets. New appliances. New everything. There was a fire or something because of the last tenants and they stripped it out completely.
So...this room is awesome. Problem solved.
Congrats!
This really depends on how well the people adjacent to your apartment keep their stuff up. I lived in a condo one time where I would call in exterminators and all the bugs would just run into the other spaces next to me, then come back out when the poison was done. Of course the other owners refused to pay the price to have their apartment done at the same time. I ended up moving out of the place mainly for that reason.