So, as those of you who read my last note know, Prairie and I are in the midst of a major upheaval, part of which includes getting Prairie moved to Ellensburg on a moment’s notice. This has rapidly descended into a particularly hellish experience.
Last week, when all this started, we started looking for one bedroom Eburg apartments for Prairie, searching real estate websites and Craigslist from our place in Kent. Since we were calling around on Christmas Eve day, we weren’t terribly surprised when we couldn’t get ahold of many offices, but we were able to get ahold of one of the most promising looking places: a 1-bedroom unit, half of a duplex, that was listed on Craigslist. The landlord sounded decent on the phone, and was willing to do a short-term four-month lease, so we set up an appointment to look at the place while we were in Ellensburg so that Prairie could have a few meetings about the transition to her new job.
We got there, and while it’s an old building and the place looked kind of funky (in a fun, quirky kind of way), it was actually quite a bit bigger than we expected, and we agreed that it would fit our needs perfectly. We signed the lease, got a key, put the utilities in Prairie’s name, and (after the work meetings) came back home to pack for the move.
Yesterday morning, with the help of Prairie’s dad, we schlepped all the stuff she’d packed out to the new place…and it wasn’t long before things started to look a little pear-shaped. There’s an extension cord sticking out of one wall that can be plugged into one of the few interior outlets, and leads outside, apparently to the floodlights for the parking spots, but it doesn’t seem to actually do anything. We’re not entirely sure why that is, but Prairie’s dad looked at it and said that it looks like there’s some disconnected and possibly exposed wiring. The electrical socket in the kitchen underneath the counter is kind of falling out of the wall, and because there’s no other socket close to the refrigerator, there’s an extension cord (just barely long enough to reach) with a plug doubler on the end running from that socket to the fridge (I added a power strip to the mix so that the cord wasn’t quite so stretched, and so that we could plug in the toaster and microwave). There are cobwebs in a number of places around the apartment, indicating that it hasn’t had a good cleaning anytime recently. When we touched the shower head in the bathroom, it literally fell off of the pipe. Initially, this wasn’t a big deal, as we were planning on putting a newer shower head on anyway, but when we tried to remove the old pipe, the threads broke inside the socket, rendering the shower unusable. However, even the unusable shower paled in comparison to the realization that the pipes were frozen, and there was no running water.
So, by noon yesterday, we’d had electrical weirdnesses, cleaning grumbles, broken plumbing, and frozen pipes. We called the landlord, and I (reluctantly) left Prairie to wait for calls from the plumber and Roto Rooter (since the plumber doesn’t have the equipment to deal with frozen pipes) to let her know when they would be arriving, and Prairie’s dad brought me back home to Kent. That evening, Prairie let me know that the plumber made it out that afternoon to fix the shower, but all she’d gotten from Roto Rooter was a statement that they’d “probably” be out to her place between 8 and 10 this morning, though they wouldn’t actually make a definitive statement.
By 9:30 a.m. this morning, Prairie’d heard nothing from anyone, and was justifiably pissed. After filling me in, she made another round of calls to Roto Rooter and the landlord, and Roto Rooter finally showed up just before noon (perhaps coincidentally, but perhaps not, just before the 24-hour window where landlords are legally required to respond in instances where apartments lose water or heat). As the Roto Rooter guy started to try and work, he wasn’t sure where the pipes came into the building, so Prairie called the landlord…who didn’t know. The Roto Rooter guy went over to ask the neighbors in the other half of the duplex, who weren’t sure about where the pipes were, but did say that frozen pipes is apparently a pretty regular occurrence for the building. Great.
So, as the Roto Rooter guy got to work, Prairie went off to the store to find space heaters, as one of the things tenants can do to avoid problems it to keep space heaters near the interior pipes during cold weather. She gets back home with the heaters, plugs them in…and not much later, a fuse blows and the entire place loses power. And, of course, these aren’t circuit breakers, but old screw-in style fuses. So, another call to the landlord…and that’s when I put out the question about whether there is such a thing as the rental equivalent of a “lemon law” or “buyer’s remorse” clause. At this point, it was looking like if things didn’t improve fast, we’d be better off just getting out while the getting was good, and finding Prairie a different place.
However, things do seem like they’re improving…or at least on the way to improvement. Roto Rooter hasn’t succeeded in getting water flowing yet, though they are certainly trying: as of the last update from Prairie, they’ve gone from one guy to two vans, three guys, and a “big scary machine” working on the pipes. More importantly, though, when the landlord came by with more fuses, Prairie was able to get him to agree that after all the problems, if the water doesn’t get going soon (by tonight or tomorrow morning) then he will be willing to let Prairie out of the lease so that she can find another place. We’re still hoping that it won’t come to that — there are enough good aspects to the place (location, price, size, the short-term lease, etc.) that we’d rather keep it if it’s livable, and the process of finding another place (quickly) and moving (quickly) again isn’t terribly appealing — but at least we’ve been assured that we won’t be locked into a lease on an apartment that isn’t actually livable.
Once again: Wish us luck! We need it!