Mould, Must, and Mildew

Today, Alex and I got some great news: the landlady is replacing the carpet in our apartment.  We're getting pretend-hardwood.  Do you understand how great this is?

As much as I'm not looking forward to the headaches that accompany having the flooring of my apartment ripped up, I am absolutely elated at the thought of our reeking, mould-infested carpet being removed from my living quarters.

The carpet is definitely one of the first things I remember about this place, mostly because of the smell it emits.  But I would be remiss if I did not go on to highlight some of its other key characteristics.  Not only can you smell (and in some cases, see) the mould, you can feel it.  When you walk across the carpet, there's a damp feeling - the kind of dampness where you feel like you should wipe your feet after, but the dampness doesn't stick to your feet; it remains snugly within the purple, threadbare carpet.

I believe I have touched on the purple patches of mould blooming underneath the linoleum in my kitchen and bathroom, but I have to say, this doesn't bother me as much.  I feel like it's trapped underneath there, like  fish under a frozen lake.  It's probably a false sense of security, but I'll take it.

The mould in the carpets leaves nothing to the imagination; it offers no room for me to create a lie in which I can take comfort.  When you can see/smell/feel the mould, it makes it pretty damn hard to pretend it's not there.  And the health consequences are getting a little hard to ignore.  Alex has been sick pretty much since before I moved in here and recently I've been throwing up in the morning (and before my friends can make hilarious jokes about it, no, I'm not pregnant.  Douchebags).

So what do we do about it?  It's too late to get another place.  We've tried some basic stuff. Vacuuming, hairdryers, Lysol, dehumidifier.  Alex washed his floor in laundry detergent and vinegar tonight. He's sleeping in the living room because he literally cannot sleep in his room anymore.  His clothes are hanging up in my closet because his room smells so bad.  ***This is not because Alex smells bad.  Alex smells wonderful.  It's 110% the mould that is making this smell.***

I was just debating the merits of pouring bleach all over our floors (or...you know...gasoline and a match), and then Alex played a voicemail for me.  Our landlady wants to come into our apartment on Thursday to take measurements for new floors.  They should be in within the next two weeks.  Goodbye mould. And good riddance.

****

In other news, I saw two bums beating the shit out of each other on the way home from work last week.  And when I say on the way home, I mean across the street from my driveway.  Did I mention we live next to a methadone clinic?

Guests

FIRST AND FOREMOST

We have hot water.  Thank you all for listening to me complain about this for a week.  And thank you to Vanessa for letting me come over and shower in the morning before work.



So this weekend, we had guests.  Taylor and Elaine showed up to stay with us for a few days.

We went for drinks (frequently), toured Parliament, saw The Shining at an old theatre (as per usual, Elaine fell asleep during the movie), etc.  One of the bars we went to was supposed to be a Maritime themed bar.  I asked the singer to play the most Maritime-y song he knew.

"Uh...I just moved here from Miami...soooooo I don't know any?  I can give you guys a shout out though.  HEY EVERYONE! THESE GUYS ARE FROM HALIFAX!  Everyone put your drink in the air - CHEERS!"

To which the Halifax crew yelled back "SOCIABLES!"

The former Floridian gave us a confused look and started singing something from the Top 40.

(Don't worry - we all ended up back at our apartment, very drunk, bellowing out Barrett's Privateers).



When Taylor and Elaine first got here, I explained to them that I had spent a few hours cleaning the place, but that they wouldn't be able to tell.  They came into the basement, looked around, and nodded.  I showed them around, which took about 5 seconds, and we started to chat in the kitchen.

Elaine poked at some strange black stain on the floor with her toe.  She looked up and said, "All these black marks are kind of just stuck to the floor, eh?"

I nodded, and told her that I had swept.  And mopped.

She looked around the floor, and as I noticed her eyes stop on the big purple patch under the white linoleum, I preemptively answered her question.

"We're pretty sure that's mold that got underneath the floor.  It's in the bathroom too.  It just looks funny, but it seems pretty harmless down there."

She laughed and shook her head.  "You know," she said, "I really thought you were exaggerating about this place."

I smiled, and nodded.

"It's...," she began.  "There's lots of um..."

"Please don't," I said.  "You really don't need to feel like you have to find something to compliment.  We'll be here all day.  And it's only for a few months."

She laughed and said, "Well, they put hardwood floors in our penthouse, so you have that to look forward to when you come back in September."



Good news though - we got the hot water fixed the morning they showed up, so hot showers were available for our guests (and more importantly, for us).  Our landlady let us borrow her vacuum.  And we cleared the garbage off our porch, so now we have a pretty sweet sitting spot outside.

Things are coming up Milhouse.

The Week that Hell Froze Over.

Greetings, slummerinos. 

So, our hot water tank broke this week.

That is to say the bottom fell out. This happens to appliances that are older than I am. Maybe to people too. I'm not there yet.

I first noticed on Monday morning when I went to shower. The shower was cold. Not just cheap-hotel, early-flight, needed-to-sober-up-anyway cold, but my-testicles-just-sent-me-photos-from-Antarctica cold. That is pretty damn cold.

At first I blamed Andrea, because she was around and it was convenient. I said, jokingly, "Hey, roommate. Way to use up all that hot water". She shot me a stare that was icier than the shower. Then I knew we had a problem.

See, I've bathed in the lake with a soap bar before, or washed myself in a barrel of rain. I call it camping (or, alternatively, visiting my folks). So really, the lack of hot water was never the problem. Going to work has been the problem. I've been sleeping in the woods, waking up, brushing myself off with pine needles, throwing on my finest squirrel-skin cloak and stepping into an office. This week I had a surprise evaluation. It went well, probably. I barely listened. I fixated on how bad I smelled, and hoped that the lawyer evaluating me didn't have the sudden urge to take a whiff. Which lawyers are known to do.

The other day, walking home, I encounter two shaggy-clothed men for who seemed generally indifferent about having hot water. I was listening to my music. One of them yelled something at me. I stopped and listened. Here's how our conversation went:

"Hey, you a lawyer?"
"Umm yeah. Actually I am. Wait, no. Not yet. Maybe one day."
"Hey, are you James Bond?"
"Yes. Yes I am."
"Want to make some money?"
...
(the remainder of this conversation has been removed due to solicitor-client privilege)

It's good to know that I can go a week without showering, and be mistaken for 007.

Andrea has been a good sport. She has substantially more hair that I do, and that lovely Georgia-peach competition of hers. Naturally, she also has higher hygiene standards. Furthermore, she works at a law firm where people seem to care what you smell like.

I wouldn't exactly call her a "morning person", the same way I wouldn't exactly call Rob Ford a Nobel Laureate. She also doesn't seem to drink coffee (poor thing). So take away her one morning ritual, and she's bound to get a little ornery. But she's mostly been cool about it. In a passive-aggressive, good-thing-she's-on-my-side kind of way.

Today I felt innovative. I boiled a pot of water in our large cooking pot, and bathed with it. Which felt a-mazing, until I realized that I was washing myself in bits of pasta, because we hadn't really done dishes all week, because we had no hot water. Oh, how the dogs stack up.

The repairmen came by the other night, with our landlady (i.e. the sweet old lady whose basement we live in) in tow. She was genuinely surprised that hot water tanks expire at all. Then she noticed that someone had run an exhaust pipe through her basement door (i.e. our fire exit). She was not pleased about that, and demanded to know where it came from. The repairman politely informed her that he didn't have a goddamned idea. There was some haggling over the pricing, and I had to basically broker a water-heater deal. Law students never rest, I swear.

So all is resolved: the tank is being replaced tomorrow. If you need me, I'll be in the shower.

Organizational Notes

Things my apartment does not have:

• Hot water (and significantly less cold water as well)
• A dishwasher
• Laundry on the premises
• A vacuum
• A toaster
• An iron
• A dresser for my clothes
• Functional blinds
• An emergency exit (unless you count the windows you can crawl out of)

Things my apartment does have:

• Mold
• Wet carpets (kind goes with the mold)
• Booby traps
• A room full of other people's shit
• Bizarre stains on the kitchen floor that challenge you to get creative with what could have possibly caused them
• Bars on the windows
• Giant cracks in my wall that make noises at night
• Cracks in the bathroom sink
• Other peoples' pictures in my closet (they were here when I moved it...I'm not a freak.  #okmaybesometimes #dealwithitkevan)
• Large spiders
• Tiny ants
• A ton of empties - but seriously, how else are we supposed to deal with the rest of this shit sober?
• A pretty great roommate (except that he seems to think ketchup-popcorn-flavouring is a meal...)

***I bought a toilet bowl scrubber.  So that adds that to the "Things my apartment does have" list and removes "20 million red rings in my toilet" from that same list.  Hoorah!

Welcome to Our Slumlet.

My name is Andrea.  My roommate's name is Alex.  He's pretty great - super easygoing, clean (and not just for a boy), and a lot of fun to drink with.  And he gave me the big room (#yourethebest).

Alex and I go to school together.  We're about to go into our final year of law, and we're both working as summer students at law firms in the city.

This is the story about out slummy summer sublet.

Let's go back to the beginning.  We found the place online, but we go to school halfway across the country, so we didn't fly out to see it.  We just decided to go for it.

Day 1:

I show up to my new apartment in a new city for a new job.  It's a warm, sunny day and I CAN'T WAIT to see my new place.

(*NOTE* Alex had tempered my excitement by telling me some of the downsides about our apartment (eg: not having laundry), bit by bit, in the weeks leading up to my move in.  That being said, I was still excited.)

I walk in to our cute, semi-basement apartment, look around and take a deep breathe.

And immediately regret it.

Something in this place smells like dead cat.  But it's not dead cat.  I'm allergic to cat.  So now there's this riddle going through my head as I look for my room (and a window): what smells like dead cat, but is not dead cat?

I open all the windows I can reach and the smell starts to fade.  Ok, I think, so our apartment doesn't like to be shut up tight.  But still! my room is big, the furniture is good, and the carpets are...wet.  Well, shit.  I guess that solves the riddle (the answer is mold, for those of you playing along at home).

No problem.  I'll put on some music, start to unpack, look up directions for groceries/ laundromat.  No internet? Whatever, I need to unpack anyway.  I open the broken sliding door to the closet and get showered with 1,343,560 push pins.  I open the blinds to get some light in my room find the push pins that now litter my carpet.  In true Murphy's-law-fashion, the blinds come crashing down on me.

Alex comes home from a camping trip about an hour after I get in.  He gives me a big hug, and after we chat for a while he says, "I'm so sorry to do this on your first day."  He walks to the bathroom, and barfs.  "You might need to figure out where the grocery store is on your own."

So I do.  I do laundry (dropping all my clean bedding on a major city street, in the process) and do groceries.  I come home and finish unpacking.

Alex is a super trooper.  He gets it together and decides to take me on a tour of the Market (the drinking district of the city).  And he's a great tour guide.  We go out and have a few beers, come home, make dinner together, and swap stories.

We agree that we need to get a wireless router so we can get internet in more than just the living room...for science.

I've lived here for a week.

The carpets still have wet spots, there's no vacuum (and maybe the rentees took the vacuum and the toilet bowl cleaner with them when they took off to the summer, but judging by the carpets and the toilet, they have never heard of either of these items), and we our hot water tank broke and flooded 3 days ago.  It's not that we don't have hot water, it's just that it's all over the floor and not in the pipes.  Landlady? Gone.  Maintenance man? Gone.  Cold showers in the morning? Oh baby.

But! my blinds are balanced (Alex admitted the blinds-fiasco miiiiiight have been his fault), my bed is super comfy, the apartment is in an amazing location, and our hot water might even get fixed this week!

This is going to be a summer of antics, inebriation, and broken pipes.  It's a damn good thing the two of us have solid senses of humour.  We're going to need them.

Side note: as I was writing this, Alex was trying to turn off the hot water tank.  And then I heard him yell.  And then he walked into the living room soaking wet.  My hero.