This saga begins during the summer while we were in Florida. We had found a girl who wanted to rent our apartment in Williamsburg while we were away. She is a member of the church, and seemed to be a very nice girl. Just to make sure, I called some poeople who knew her since I did not, and did my own personal background check. Everything seemed to be fine, so we were excited at the prospect of having a little income to offset paying for an empty apartment all summer. She moved in, and two months came and went with no rent check. I won't go into all the details, but throughout those two months, Tanner spent hours trying to get a hold of her through phone and email to figure out why she had not sent her payments. When we did get a hold of her, she said it was either sent or that she was going to send it.
Finally one day, I had reached the end of my rope, and after talking about it with my mom, we decided we needed to bring down the hammer. Admittedly, I was a total chicken, and my mom called and said the following without identifying who she was: "Aimee, if you do not send a check within the next hour (via paypal) the locks will be changed on the apartment and you will not be able to get in." We received the money. Tanner called her later to have a chat about everything that had occured over the course of the summer and to try to let her know that despite her circumstances, she needed to be honest and communicate with us, of which she had done neither. She informed Tanner on the phone that she would be moving out within the next week (a month earlier than scheduled) because she needed to go back home to Maine. We wondered what would have happened had we never sent her the ultimatum. I am convinced she would have left having never paid us a dime. We called our landlord to have them change the locks two days after she was scheduled to move out...just in case. I felt like I was being a little paranoid, but we just wanted to be sure. So I am not quite sure what we were expecting to find when we returned to our apartment, but certainly not what we actually found. The following is a partial list:
1. An entire sink full of dirty dishes
2. A refridgerator with month old milk and fruit
3. Dead flowers on the tables with wax all over the kitchen table from candles
4. An unswept, unvacuumed apartment
5. A dirty shower and sink in the bathroom
and the kicker??
6. Beer bottles and numerous cigarette butts in trash bags packed into our water heater closet.
We were shocked and enraged, all the while Clark was thinking this was the coolest new place to go exploring! I would have taken a picture of the beer bottles and cigarette butts for the blog, but I demanded that they be taken to the trash IMMEDIATELY. The interesting part of the story was that we also noticed that there was another baby who had been here. I felt like Goldilocks and the three bears when I went into Clark's room and saw a pink bunny in his crib and other toys I did not recognize when I said "Clark, someone has been sleeping in your bed!" We are not entirely sure what occured here while we were gone, but we are pretty sure that when we had the locks changed, whoever this girl had allowed to be in our apartment must have been pretty shocked when they returned to find that they could not get in...and we felt like we achieved a small victory with that. Some gifts we found that we have decided to keep include:
1. A brand new hippo walker that eats other toys.
2. A piggy bank or I guess hippobank that had $15 in it.
3. Our renter's laundry detergent that we used to wash all the towels and sheets that she had left piled up in the corner of our bedroom and in our closets.
4. A Mulan DVD that we found under our bed.
After 3 solid days of cleaning and washing, I am glad we got something and I am glad nothing of ours was severely damaged or stolen. You know it's bad when you have resorted to being happy with that.
6 comments:
oh my gosh.. how horrible for you guys to come home to.. Not to mention dealing with trying to collect your rent all summer..But I am loving the hippo walker. The twins next door to us have one, I am sure Clark will love playing with him...
Wow, what a nightmare! Any lingering cigarette smell in the apartment?
I personally love the hippo bank.
Score on the hippo walker and bank!...and yet...Glad that's over!
No lingering cigarette smell inside the apartment, although there was a huge bottle of febreeze on the kitchen counter, so at least they tried to mask it! Although that didn't stop me from buying 5 air fresheners and carpet freshener at the store!
btw...i did identify myself...i said, "This is Debbie Carter" and I am calling on behalf of Cherylyn.
She is probably out at this very moment tracking down her list of Debbie Carter's in the world!
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