This whole blogging thing is not the easiest. I don’t really know what to write here and when I do think of something, my computer is nowhere to be found. I do carry a small notebook and pen with me at all times in case I have some sort of ideas about all kinds of things, maybe I should use that for blogging ideas also. Anyway, that isn’t what this is meant to be about. I need to rant.
Topic: Attached Living
- THE BUGS! I am soooo tired of little invaders. I do understand that bugs are an issue that people who live in freestanding homes have to deal with also, however, it is not quite the same. Since I have been living in apartments I have encountered three of the absolute worst infestations I could imagine. Fleas are a pretty normal thing, especially when you have a pet cat or dog. The reason this is so bad in attached living situations is no matter how clean YOUR pet is, how flea free YOUR home is, or what kind of flea treatment you put on YOUR pet. When you take your pet outside, they come in. When there is a real infestation, I mean really freaking bad, the fleas are even non-discriminate about things. You may not know that there are different flea species that prefer the blood of specific animals but there are. When I bathed my dog yesterday (She is still mad at me by the way, it’s kind of funny) she had some fleas. . .cat fleas. You may wonder how you can tell the difference. My mother was a very successful pet salon owner for many years and I spent A LOT of time at work with her. But a reference for others.
Roaches are another infestation that I cannot stand. Yes I am aware that roaches happen in all kinds of living situations. I also know that with the correct cleaning and treatments schedule they are of the easier to control/minimize. Apartment complexes include a section of the lease that expresses that they have a pest control routine, in my experience, that “routine” only exists if you ask the management office about it over and over and over until they are tired of looking at your face and call the pest company and set up A visit. Then a couple of weeks later the cycle starts over with the office and this pest control “routine” never truly gets established. In the off chance that you do gt through to them and they send someone out to spray/treat, you are lucky if they even consider the words you say about where you have seen the most of them or even anything really.
In 2016, My oldest was two and I was pretty darn pregnant with my second, we found some apartments in a great area, centrally located, appeared to be clean and well maintained from the road, gated community, friendly office staff. They took us on a tour of their model apartment for the floor plan we were interested in and we loved it. It was clean, nice to look at, and seemed perfect for our little family. We move in about a month later and it was comfortable for a week. I am not the cleanest person in the whole worlds, but a kitchen that you haven’t even moved into yet, as in the only food in the kitchen is cold food, water, and milk in the refrigerator. My husband was working overnights at the time and I was pregnant and having trouble sleeping. I would get up in the middle of the night for some water and turn the light ion in the kitchen only to find thousands of the little demons! We had an exterminator come out about a month later after I pestered the office enough, the guy was very rude, very judgey, (I still hadn’t moved into the kitchen at this point. There were so many and that seemed to be their breeding ground so I had turned my dining room into kitchen storage, food flatware, silverware, cups and glasses, you better believe they were in the dining room.), and not thorough at all. He didn’t even go into the attached to the kitchen laundry nook and I don’t even believe he actually sprayed anything. I couldn’t find any wet spots in any of the places he put the spray wand. It was frustrating. I learned that the cleaning spray “409” is a deterrent and it kills them on contact. So I bought A TON of that. I didn’t want to bring my baby into an infested dump. Which is how I felt about my new home. We wanted internet installed, they came to put it in and couldn’t find a live box they could use so the technician proceeded to attempt to remove an old box so that he could put in a new one. He hit the old box to get it loose as the edges had been painted over several times it looked like, and the front plate fell off. I want to vomit even remembering that day. The amount of roaches that poured out of the wall from this electrical box that was maybe a 1 1/2 by 2 inch big. I legitimately had nightmares about bugs while living in that apartment. In attached living though, it doesn’t matter how clean you or your home are. Doesn’t even matter what kind of treatment you have done on personal terms or that is ordered by the leasing office, if your building sharing neighbors don’t also show the same concern for the issue, it will never be resolved.
By far the worst infestation of my life, also the most terrifying, bed bugs. I don’t really want to go into great detail about these encounters, yes, multiple. They are disgusting. The first time I didn’t live in the best part of town. I lived with my three best guy friends. Our downstairs neighbors had been evicted recently and there was a couch that had been left behind. I came home from work one day to find that couch in my living room. Worst day. . .When I saw the first bug I went ballistic and the smallest pf the three guys went completely hulk and threw the couch over the balcony into the parking lot just barely missing my car parked below. That was absolutely awful. I worked at the airport and because of them, couldn’t return to work for two weeks and had to part with 90 percent of my wardrobe. I showed up at Aly’s with nothing but my computer, my wallet, and the clothes on my back. The second time, I was engaged to be married and had moved in with my now husband who had recently escaped a bed bug situation in an apartment where he lived with three other guys. He only took his electronics and some clothing when he moved out of there. We lived happily and without cares for a few months. Our neighbors downstairs had moved out and another family moved in and they began complaining about bugs. They had all kinds of treatments and then ultimately decided to move out. shortly after they moved out, I saw one. A single bed bug in the crease between wall and ceiling. I don’t think that I slept for days. I sat on a plastic cooler in the middle of the bedroom as far away from the walls as possible while my now husband pulled up all of the edges of the carpet and searched. He then caulked all of the edges under the baseboards. We then laid boric acid and replaced the carpet. Never saw another one in that apartment. The single bug that I had noticed, no doubt came through the walls from the apartment where all of the treatments had happened and then food sources had moved away. Attached living. . .
2. The Crunchy People. That is the name we have given extremely heavy-footed upstairs neighbors. At least since we have had children. We have lived in two apartments with upstairs neighbors. The first one was interesting. Our upstairs neighbor was an extremely petite young woman. She sounded like a herd of elephants! She didn’t have any roommates or family living there. She didn’t have any pets. She and only she lived there. The herd of elephants wasn’t so bad during the day, however, this woman kept strange hours. In the middle of the night it would begin. It sounded like there was a herd of elephants performing a ballet recital above our heads. Often we thought that something was going to fall through the ceiling on top of us. My oldest took months to be able to fall asleep and stay asleep through the noise. I was pregnant so I couldn’t sleep through it for whatever reason. The apartment we currently live in is much the same except there are two whole families living in the apartment above us. They have carpet, two dogs, and cuss a lot. You always know when these crunchy people are headed to the kitchen or when they are attempting to have a meal in the dining room. You can hear them pull their chairs out and sit down. My oldest has told them we call them the crunchy people and even asked why they make so much noise. It truly sounds like the support beams in the building are going to collapse at any moment. Oh my goodness. If they drop anything at all, it sounds almost like it was dropped in our apartment. I don’t hear a whole lot from my back wall neighbors aside from the occasional thud, but I will be happy when I no longer know my neighbor’s bathroom routines by the sounds of their footsteps.
3. Privacy? Not a chance! Not only is the whole complex, whether it be one building or eighty buildings or better, there is no privacy A prime example is me knowing when my upstairs neighbor heads to the kitchen for whatever reason or that I know someone upstairs’ bathroom schedule. Never mind those things. Outdoors. Even if you have a fenced patio, that is not private. The walls are thin. People hear everything. My son was asking me to wipe his but because his, you know, stunk too bad and he didn’t want to wipe anything that stinky. I responded from the living area, “That’s not my job anymore! I on’t ask you to wipe my butt every time I think it stinks too much do I? Would you like to wipe my but?” One of my neighbors told me I was cruel and should have gone to the bathroom and helped him. She gave me the evil eye for a week. Little does she know, this happens every day. Just because his brother still wears diapers and I have to wipe his butt, doesn’t mean that it is still mom’s job to wipe the butt of a young man who is fully capable of doing it himself and just refuses. I don’t like to have groups of people over because when we step outside for those of us who still smoke cigarettes, the foot traffic is enough to drive a person nuts. I do not have one of those fences that keep people off of my porch. People peak into my window, mostly children because a toy or a child inside caught their eye, but its the simple fact that they are allowed by whoever to just run up and smash their face on my window screen. I recently attempted to grow some vegetables on my patio. A friend built me this really nice cedar stair stepper plant stand, my plants were doing fantastic. I even had a toad living in one of my broccoli plants for a while. The Texas sun and heat took it’s toll on them but we were powering through til fall. Fall happens and there is this cat roaming about. This cat likes to sit on my patio chair and taunt my poor Kneela at all hours of the day and night. My plants were getting worse and worse by the day no matter what I did to help them. I was attempting to re-pot thinking maybe a few are root-bound. In this process is when it happened, ammonia, soooooo strong! I realized the cat had sprayed my peppers. I started checking the rest, all of the food plants with the exception of collard greens, sprayed or peed on. I am not sure which. I am just upset about it. Another thing that goes along with no privacy is that people, much like the kids that enjoy peeping, feel like they have free roam of my patio. I came home one day and there were two grills on my patio that weren’t. Why? I have had hand painted decorative flower pots, ashtrays, several packs of cigarettes, lighters, and children’s shoes all stolen from my patio.
While some of these things aren’t avoidable no matter where you live, and attached living does have its perks in other ways (no-maintenance pools, free gyms in some cases, on premises dog park, maintenance issues are not your financial responsibility for the most part), I needed to rant about this. I woke up at 5:30 AM today to the sounds of the crunchy people to find the cat and my Kneela dog having a stare down through the tiniest space at the bottom of the blinds and my patio chairs moved around and lost it a little bit.
