Whee! More apartment shit!
Why is it I can't ever move from one place to another without all kinds of bullshit?

So, the problems we've been having over the past year with our landlady and her drunken belligerent fuck of a boyfriend/superintendent have been pretty well documented here. But recently it came to an ugly head.

See, when our lease was up, we looked around for a new apartment. Couldn't find one we'd qualify for which was in our price range. About a month and a half before our lease was to end, I mentioned to our landlady that we were going to be moving our of her building to cheaper digs. She offered us the first floor apartment, which was three hundred dollars cheaper, and a fair bit smaller. We accepted, and that's when all the trouble started.

See, come the beginning of our new lease, the first floor apartment was not ready. Our landlady assured us that it would be ready to move into as soon as the previous tenant removed his belongings from it, and it had been thoroughly cleaned.

Two weeks went by, and finally, his stuff was removed by the landlady. Then some time after that, we went into the apartment to find it full of the superintendent's things, and with the kitchen fully pulled apart. The stove was in the middle of the kitchen, some of the counters were not installed, so on and so forth. There were also the characteristic-of-this-building not connected to any existent heating system vent holes in the ceiling, some of which had grates hanging from a single screw.

This trend continued. Then, three days ago, we were approached by the landlady, who has been showing our third-floor apartment to potential tenants on a regular basis, and coming in occasionally to fix it up (they even patched all the holes in the ceiling! That only took a frikkin' year). The landlady demanded to know when we were going to move into the first floor apartment. The conversation went a bit like this:

HER: Hey, Mike. When are you going to be out of this unit and into the first floor?
ME: Well, that all depends on you. When is the apartment downstairs going to be ready to move into?
HER: It's been ready for days.
ME: Really? Because all I've heard over and over is 'It's going to be ready any day now' Noone told us it was ready.
HER: Well, you knew that I had a rented lined up who wanted this unit. You need to be out of there in the next few days, or I'm going to have to charge you the $900 for this apartment.
ME: (Turns into giant monster and lays waste to Chicago)

OK, So that last part not so much. But I don't honestly remember the rest of that conversation, because I was raging. Not out loud, and not violently, partly because her horse of a dog was at that point forcibly trying to sniff the spot behind my scrotum. (It should be noted that I love that dog. He's a good dog. But he's huge, and there's no way in hell I'll ever risk raising my voice to the landlady when the dog has his teeth that close to my nutsack.)

So then we re-visit the apartment. Our pleasant surprise at the place finally being finished turns first to disappointment, then to anger, as we come to find out that not only is the apartment not finished, but it's basically unlivable. There are mouse turds in the stove, which is still solidly in the middle of the kitchen, and not hooked up. There are still uninstalled counter tops. There are dead rodents in the unit. The flooring in two of the rooms (wood-patterned linoleum, which by itself is tacky as all hell, and cheaper than a two-dollar whore, but not in any way actionable) has been improperly installed. Some of the walls are water-damaged. The front door is cracked in such a manner that I'm reasonably certain that it could be broken into with very little force. And the fridge... I've never smelled anything like it. And it has duct tape for handles. I don't know. the smell could just be warm fridge. It might be better after the electricity gets turned on. Also, the bathroom. Mostly it's OK, but the floor seems to be at an angle, and the tub has a giant hole under it at one end. My downstairs neighbor took a picture of that hole with his digital camera, and in the harsh light of a flash, the filth there looked like something out of the Alien movies.

All in all, not nice.

So, we're about to try and get litigious. We've suffered gross mistreatment at this point, from the repeated harassment we've gotten from whenever the super is drunk and notices us, to the noise problems we get when he's drunk and decides he'd like to play some music at 2 AM, to the noise problems we get when he's drunk and notices our downstairs neighbors, to the complete and total neglect our building has gotten over the past year.

And this isn't just a quality of life thing. Sarah has a stress-triggered and degenerative illness, and this has tended to bring one more and more attacks as time goes on.

It has impacted health, happiness, and generally made us want to set them on fire. So, yeah, it's the American way. let's sue, amirite?