So let's start with a bit of history. In the pasts 6 years I have lived in 9 different apartments/houses and have moved more than 20 times. Red has also lived in 9 different places and moved across the world and back. Let's just say, to put it kindly, we are absolutely sick of moving and renting.
To touch on past quality, I will delve into a few of the lovely dives we lived in.
My sophomore year I moved into a studio with a bed that fell out of the wall. Amazingly, it was pretty comfy. The one down side about the bed attached to the wall, is that you get to know your neighbor and his girl friend a bit more personally than you would like. At 2 am precisely they would get it on (you 'prolly know where this is going). Since our beds were connected to the same wall, when they were rockin', so was I. Since I also didn't have cable and my TV only got one channel, I watched a ton of Star Trek at 2 am....
You can see the bed with the closet doors (isn't that nice wood paneling!).
When I got my co-op in Kentucky, I moved into a very nice, large 2 bedroom for about $300 a month. Sometimes the quality of the apartment does not clue you into the quality of the neighbors. I remember watching a lady put her children through an empty apartment window so she and her boyfriend could steal the appliances. You might wonder why these quality people had to include their small children in this adventure, well quite simply put, they were too fat to get through the window. Here is the only semi alright picture of the Ky apartment (yeah that is pyramid guitar hero, not much to do in that state).
The house Red rented at school for Super Senior Semester was not too bad... once we cleaned it for a day straight but cleaning cannot fix the code violations. The previous tenets had started a "small" fire in the kitchen destroying the gas stove. The solution the landlord came up with was to replace the stove with electric and run the 220v with a long extension cord through a door way and plug it into the outlet for the dryer*. Don't worry about cutting the cord in two with the door or cooking and doing laundry at the same time.
Clearly not a safety issue!
At the moment we are living in the nicest place either of us have ever rented, with some of the best landlords we have ever had. Unfortunately, with my new job I am driving 130 miles a day and between gas and rent, it is just not working. Not to mention being on the road 2 hours (in good weather) a day. So we started looking at rentals close to work, and they are just garbage. One landlord actually told me about a great house with a one car garage, all I would need to do is fix the hole in it and replace the garage door. Not to mention the majority of rentals are also for sale and we could be given 30 days to leave at anytime.
Then we discovered the $11,000 house that needs some work. That is less than rent and gas money for a year at the moment. So, to say the least, it has got us looking to buy something, if nothing else but sometwhere we can survive in for a year and not waste money fixing a rental.
Stay tuned for an interesting adventure on top of an already packed year...moving, wedding, cats, motorcycles...the list doesn't stop.
*You can never run an electrical cord through a doorway
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