Renting, of course, has its advantages and its disadvantages.The main advantage, I suppose, is that you don’t have to engage in that Sisyphean task of keeping the place up. The main disadvantage is, I suspect, having to deal with property of varying quality and landlords of varying quality if you rent.
I have rarely made much money over the course of my life so most of the rented flats I have lived in have been in general OK. Only one of the apartments I resided in was beyond redemption. It never should have been allowed to host renters in the first place but then cities and towns are not always good at assuring that a place is liveable. The political powers that be tend to cozy up to the landlords the money men who sometimes grease their palms. A couple of the flats I let were very good. Most, however, have been mediocre at best and that includes the one I live in presently in Albany, New York.
Most of the landlords I have rented from have also been OK. Only one, the one who rented me the apartment from Hades, have been less than responsible and mediocrely ethical. A couple, one that worked for the corporation that owned the apartment complex I lived in, were excellent making sure that what needed to have fixed in the flat was fixed within a few days. Most of my landlords have been, including the one I have now, more slow in fixing problems.
The landlord I have now, for instance, is often as slow as molasses in fixing the things in the apartment that need to be fixed. For instance, the apartment I live in at present has a tile shower—a mould bearing tile shower to be precise—that has needed fixing for ten years or so. It still does. Why the dlanlord uses tiles in a shower which requires early upkeep because of the humidity and the resulting mould is beyond me. Fetish for tiles perhaps? It is certainly not because of the aesthetic qualities of tiles which make up tile shower because my tile shower would drive even beauty is in my eye Christina from the HGTV TV channel batty.
There are other things in the flat that also need fixing and which, though I have told him, the dlanlord ignores. The kitchen cabinets of particle board, for instance, are literally deteriorating and the detritus of these needs to be swept up periodically. I had to remove the doors of several because their magnets no longer work and they have holes in them where the knobs used to be. Lovely. The kitchen light is one of those long fluorescent tube light fixtures that looks like it belongs in some low rent down on its luck office buildings on the wrong side of town from 1950. I can no longer change the bulbs in this installation because it requires a step stool and flexibility I no longer have given that it hangs by wires from the old ceiling above where one of those panel and metal ceiling replacements was installed in the 1970s. This delightful desecration—the drop ceiling that is—is found in every room of the flat save the water closet. The kitchen linoleum looks little better than a dirt floor given its age and state of disrepair. It is shedding The living room light barely lights the living room. The gas stove and oven is kaput. The dlanlord said he would wheel in another used one in—the last one he wheeled in was not well cleaned and the rust he failed to clean off led to massive cracks in the stove and oven—and I said yes if he did a thorough cleaning job—not his usual crap one he does and calls it pretty—after he wheeled it or if he laid down moving rugs so very minimal cleaning could be done. He refused both options. There are no laundry facilities and so I have to drive a mile or so to do the laundry. The place is cold because the radiator heat is nineteenth century—the house first appears on an 1850 census—though the landlord does allow space heaters (he pays the electricity), which, alas, are of limited utility in raising the temperature in a place with virtually no insulation and walls so tender that a moderate touch cracks them. There is almost no ventilation in the flat since there are no fans (save the ones I now have blowing from the floor its windows) and its old windows do not open. There is no fan in the windowless kitchen and there there is not window that opens in the water closet (contrary to city laws). The place is dry because of the radiators and space heaters and requires a humidifier to try to correct the imbalance. It can’t. Water leaking from the ceiling—which thankfully has not occurred for a while—has, in the past, damaged my possessions including several limited edition and now out of print DVD’s and Blu-ray’s one of which now goes for over $300 dollars. I suspect the place I live in hardly does wonders for my health.
The house in general—which contains five flats, two of which are empty and in need of extensive repair—is three storeys high and four people live in the remaining three flats. It is next to impossible to take an uninterrupted shower (something I was reminded of yet again today) since it seems that all all times of the day someone is using the water which ain’t fun when you are in the middle of a shower and suddenly someone turns on the water and yours goes cold. Oh the joys of a single water heater! The electricity is in need of a little loving care. This fall the dlanlord did some work on it and we had to, well I had to since I am the only retired person in the place, endure four or five interruptions of electricity so he could try to fix it. I still don’t know whether he was able to. The furnace has gone off four times over the last several years, one of which was one of these new high tech jobs that the dlanlord finally junked since it was a piece of crap.
Something that may give you further glimpses into the mind of the dlanlord is the fact that when he needed to shut the electricity off yet again recently he asked us what would be a good time for him to do this, suggesting that 1:00 pm in the afternoon would be good for him. I suggested over night or 11 am on subsequent days. Instead of changing his schedule, however, he told everyone else in the complex that the electricity could not be fixed because I would not allow it to be fixed because I did not want him to do it at 1 pm. Of course, he conveniently elided the fact that I gave him several alternative options because I wanted him to do it at a time better for me, a time when I could, with ease, do chores while he mucked about with the electricity in the cellar.
Another thing that might help understand the dlanlord is this. I am getting older with all that entails. I bought some sucker grab bars and put them up in the shower. They do not really work and after about a month the sucker stops sucking and well you know the drill. You have to take them off, alcohol them, alcohol the tiles, and stick them back up again followed by further rinses and repeats. Anyway, I asked the dlandord to put in the traditional grab bars, you know the ones that screw into the wall. He said he would but when he went out to get he—I am sure you are shocked—bought, yes, a sucker grab bar. I told him I already have two neither of which really function as they should anyway so. Well oh well.
Do I regret not buying a place? No. I don’t like to be tied down to a place though my possessions kind of make that moot at this point. Do I love renting? No. Those of us with limited incomes and who feel the limits of age, however, are ultimately beggars who can’t be choosers though so our options are inherently limited by social factors that impact us. And that means that sometimes we have to choose between not so great choices. As a consequence you sometimes can’t fear the reaper.
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