Curbed Horror Stories are firsthand reader reports about terrible San Francisco apartment experiences past and present. This week, in honor of Renters Week, we're having a rental horror story showdown. We'll post a horror story each day with a vote for the best on Thursday. The winner will advance to the national round of our network-wide contest (and the nationwide winner gets a free month's rent!). Horror stories to sf@curbed.com, if you please.
Last year around this time I found a room for rent via Craigslist. I met the landlord who gave me a quick tour of the place and I decided it was nice enough and not too expensive for my budget, besides they were one of the only places to respond from my dozens of emails to other listings.
A summary of what I had to deal with during my three months of living there:
- mice in the kitchen chewing through boxes of flour, pasta, and spices
- mice hanging out in my bedroom
- the landlord casually coming and going through the place at all
hours calling out your name to see if you were there to chat about god
knows what
- a washing machine that would only spin half the time, leaving you to
find your clothes still dripping wet after a complete cycle
- a shared bathroom (in between two rooms) that was the size of a
closet and was complete with plywood doors meaning you could hear
everything that went on inside including the aftermath of your
roommates hookup's late night burrito feast, immediately following a
lengthy round of loud intercourse
- said bathroom also featuring a shower whose hot water would last
about 60 seconds before turning ice cold forcing you to invent new
ways to speed clean yourself
And to top all of this off the landlord decided to kick us out in
order to renovate the place and rent to a family, the only thing is
they decided to begin these upgrades during our last 2-3 weeks of
living there. So we had the entire kitchen cleared, sanded and
resurfaced leaving layers of sawdust on our dishes and utensils,
workers inside all day using our bathroom, and the kitchen being
sealed off with plastic sheeting for about 2 days to finish it off.
· Renters Week 2011 coverage [Curbed]