We lived here for a year while I was pregnant and for the first 6 months of my child’s life and it was a tough experience all around. We had multiple problems in the apartment. The closet door fell on me twice and after having it fixed and still fall off, it ended up just taking up space in the living room against a wall. The kitchen sink broke on me five times and flooded the kitchen floor. I had them in to repair it twice till they just showed me how to repair it myself. The drawers in the kitchen routinely fell forward, the dryer took three hours to dry a small load of laundry, and our fireplace never worked. Neither did one of the burners on the stove and the door to our bedroom had a poorly fixed hinge that would loudly drop the door into position as it closed. Also, upon trying to clean the mold on the windows (I was pregnant and my fiance has asthma so I was very proactive about the mold), the paint bubbled up and chipped off because someone had previously painted over mold stains which the paint couldn’t adhere to. On top of all of this, the bedroom for my son was extremely small and the apartment had so little storage space that I had things stored in my living room corner. When I was eight months pregnant, the bathroom fan started leaking. When we had a worker in to fix it, he discovered a leak in the bathroom above us and had to break out the ceiling and rebuild it. He put a huge dehumidifier in my bathroom and said it needed to run for a few days and then he’d have someone come take it out. The dehumidifier was loud and took up the whole bathroom. I couldn’t close the door or sit on the toilet well which was terrible because I was going to the bathroom constantly. After almost a week without someone taking it away, I turned it off and moved it into our entry way, where it sat for a few more days before it was removed. The rest of the process took another week and a few more visits for the one guy to complete. He was very nice through the whole process though. When our year was up, they raised our rent over 20%, forcing us to find a new apt because we couldn’t afford the price. On the last day possible to turn in my intent to vacate notice, they called with an offer that was only about 50 dollars more than our current rent but I had already found a much nicer place. I spent over five hours cleaning that apartment out and when we got our move out letter, they not only took all of our 450 dollar deposit, they also charged us an additional 300 dollars. 300 for carpet cleaning (it costs 225 dollars to deep clean a 3 by 5 high traffic area apparently) 160 for full paint because I left a few scuff marks on the walls and they’re contractors don’t clean walls, 40 dollars for new blinds because the blinds had some dirt on them and they’re contractors don’t clean blinds, and 140 for another full cleaning because I apparently cleaned nothing. The employee who did my final inspection took pictures that I saw and soon realized that I wasn’t just supposed to vacuum, dust, clean off the surfaces, and wipe everything down including the light fixtures (although I followed the move out cleaning guidelines they gave me), I was supposed to detail the entire apartment. The last two apartments I moved out of I cleaned as well as I know how to clean, but I’ve never gotten a notice saying and I quote “apartment was left very dirty, nothing was cleaned.” I felt like saying, “do you know what ‘nothing was cleaned’ looks like?” If I had known they were going to try to find an excuse to charge me money, I would have found a cheaper professional cleaner to do the job or saved myself five hours of my life and left them with an actually dirty apartment.
All together, I feel cheated, abused, and sick to my stomach that I didn’t do more to document my time there so I could take legal action. I might try anyway. Lesson learned. TERRIBLE place to live.
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