So we had crazy roommates. I won’t bore you with all the details but they had rules (more than what I included, but you get the picture): No shoes in the house and we are not allowed to touch the walls while we took off our shoes. When I bought a bench to sit on for this reason she made me put it outside -.- We were not allowed to have more that 1 to 2 guests over at a time. I told them that we would give them plenty of notice before we expected to have more than two guests over. We were not allowed to “additionally decorate” the apartment. Since we had previously discussed not bringing our couch or table, my husband and I assumed that it was what they meant. We were not allowed to put dishes in the sink. They claimed to live a “minimalist lifestyle which apparently included having a giant surfboard in the living room and incense that took up half of the counter space (meaning that I was not allowed to crowd the rest) So, as you can see it was difficult to adjust to them, but she basically exploded on us one day (a week after we moved in and we had a two hour long conversation about all the other “rules” we were breaking. We argued about the bench because the girl claimed that she had told us that the bench should have been the size of the shoe rack and that it was hurting her knee to “dance around it”. Everyone else in the apartment could walk by it just fine. Also, my dad is disabled and can't bend over to take off his shoes. She told me that he should use the counter or that we should ask him to wear flip flops when visiting us. I refused to tell my guests what to wear when visiting me and that told her I was not going to force my father to step into a separate room to take off his shoes especially since we had agreed that I would buy a bench for this and I did. She refused to allow me to put a decorative plate in the kitchen which was supposed to be used for writing down recipes. She told me if the plate holds sentimental value it should go in our room. I explained that that would defeat the purpose of the plate and noted that she had decorations in the kitchen to which she replied that she doesn't burn the incense (a part of the decoration which went against her supposed minimalist lifestyle). Then she told me that I shouldn’t worry about decorations when I had other things to do. On our move in day, my mom gave me some candy because it was also the day I graduated from college. I put the candy on the counter since I always put something out for my new roommates to share. She told me that she doesn’t eat sweets. I told her that wasn’t the point. Even though we had already compromised on their no more than two guests rule, she told me that I was not allowed to have my family over for thanksgiving. She made us throw away all of the boxes that we had from unpacking. We wanted to keep some for organizing etc, but we weren’t given that option. It was obvious we didn’t have enough room for them since we had expected to be allowed to move into the entire apartment like we were paying for, not just our room, so she made us throw them all out. Her boyfriend finally decided to allow us to use one more drawer and part of another cabinet which did not make the kitchen storage anywhere near equal. I had to ask the girl not to knock on our door or talk to my husband when he was by himself. She had been constantly invading our privacy by knocking on our door for stupid things when we were obviously in there doin’ it. And she was manipulating my husband by confronting him while he was trying to get to the bathroom. She claimed that she had to clean the walls near the front door twice and at first blamed my friend who had come over. After we told her that one of us watched him remove his shoes and he never touched the walls, she finally left it at “if we don't all do it then it doesn't work”. She claimed that we had a party without asking when we moved in because our parents were there. I explained that they were just helping us to move in and she said that it was a party because my mother brought “party plates”. We were given plates because my mom gifted me a cake for my graduation. She told me that it was presumptuous of us to believe that was okay. (Apparently I have to ask before I eat cake or have help moving in. They claimed that because they were living in the apartment first, they got to make all of the rules. I explained to them that isn’t how it works, with every new person that moves in, they need to adjust the rules for the entire apartment which includes compromises to what they want. They told me that they had always made their roommates follow their rules and that if we didn’t then maybe it wasn’t a good fit. So after that fiasco, we basically tried to avoid them at all costs. You can’t fight stupid. But, my husband has a gaming PC and once he set it up, he had to ask the girl where the plug in for the Ethernet cable was. She asked him why his computer isn’t using wifi. I seriously had no response when he told me that. Anyway, we bought white electrical tape and carefully taped the wire down to the floorboard in the living room around to the back of the wall, ran it up the corner near their room and near the ceiling leading back to our room until it could be attached above the mirrored closets that we share, and then across our doorway, using the doorframes of our bedroom and our bathroom to hide the rest of the wire before it went into our room under the door. It took forever and we were trying to be nice. We could’ve just left it on the floor in the hallway. And what do they say? “Um, yeah, we’ll see if that works. Maybe you could buy a wifi adapter.” Really? Obviously we had enough and began contacting the leasing office about what we could do. They said we had two options, have everyone sit down and explain that they are wrong and they need to let us use half of the apartment, or we could move out. Catch is, no matter what the leasing office says, they can’t enforce it so they told us our better option was to move out. The way it works here is we have to have everyone in the apartment sign papers to take us off the lease so everyone knows what’s going on, so as soon as we found a place, we got the papers and put them on the refrigerator with a note asking them to sign it. That night, I received a text from the guy saying that we needed to talk. (btw, we were at the movies and this totally ruined my night because of the following) He told us that they were in full support of us moving out, but that we would not be allowed to move out unless we found replacements for ourselves. We never agreed to find replacements with them nor with the leasing office. They claimed that every roommate they had previous to us had found a replacement. So they bullied I don’t know how many people into doing this. I told them that it did not make sense to have someone that doesn’t like you choose a roommate for you and that any roommate that we found acceptable they could potentially reject and not sign the papers to let us out of the lease. He claimed that they would not do that and started to hand me a paper that was about half filled with bullet points that he said were criteria that they were looking for in a new roommate. I refused to look at the list. We later found out that having criteria like that is illegal, so not only was what they asked us to do ridiculous, but it was also illegal. I told them that we would pay the utilities for that month and they were aware that we had paid August’s rent, so anyone moving in would not have to pay anything until September. We also had decided not to ask for our security deposit back even though we gave them 30 days to find replacement. I explained that we had spoken to the leasing office and that we were not required to find replacements for ourselves. He claimed that he had called them and that the manager told him that we did have to. We later learned that she did receive a phone call from BOY, however, he refused to give his name or explain very much. She said that she knew it was him because we were the only roommate dispute going on in the entire complex. She also told us that she would never tell someone that they had to find replacement roommates. She said that during the conversation he was quick to get off of the phone and that she preferred to speak in her office with everyone rather than on the phone since it was obvious that he was taking something she said and trying to wrongfully twist it to fit his needs. I told them that we could all go down to the leasing office in the next days and sort this out with the manager. The guy refused, stating that he had “a real job” and did not have time for that. During the days leading up to our move out, the guy was constantly in the living room and would watch me as I walked from the front door to my room. This made me feel very uncomfortable to the point where I was asking my husband to go with me to the restroom for fear of a confrontation in the hallway. So on the day that we were supposed to move out, we ran into some issues with the apartment that we were supposed to move into and we wouldn’t be able to move in until the next day. That was a long day.
We woke up around 6am and went to the Home Depot to get cardboard boxes. Since she had made us throw ours away. I was sick and had an upset stomach and diarrhea which I attributed to the stress of the situation( I know, tmi, but really, that's how stressed they made us). We went to the old apartment leasing office and asked if we were allowed to stay past the date of our lease ending since we were not actually able to move in until the next day. An assistant told us that we were allowed to stay 21 days after our lease ended, as long as our roommates allowed it. We explained that we were not getting along and that was the reason for our move out. He told us that they had in fact signed and returned the papers allowing us off of our lease and that they planned to change the locks the next day. He offered us a parking permit for our u haul until Monday (this was Saturday) because he was concerned for us and did not seem to agree with the situation that we were in. We went to the nearest u haul facility with a truck big enough, which was in another city. Then my husband got ready for work and I went to the new apartment leasing office to sort out everything before moving in the next day. As soon as I got them the information that they needed, I went back to the old apartment and began packing as much as I could. I attempted to get the dolly out of the uhaul and was unable to do so by myself (I didn’t have scissors), but during this time, I witnessed a minor car accident and stopped what I was doing to make sure that everyone in the car was okay. Around 8pm, I realized that there would be no way I could lift the items into the uhaul by myself. My husband was expected to get off of work at midnight, and I wanted to try to get as much done before he got home as possible, so I went and picked up my friend so that he could help me move things quicker. He took the night off of work in order to help us. My friend and I then worked as quickly as we could, taking breaks for water and to catch our breath. We were able to get some things out of the apartment, but not very much before the guy came into the room at 11:50 and told us that we had ten minutes to leave. It was obvious that we would not be able to get the rest of my belongings out of the apartment within the next ten minutes. I explained that the leasing office said we had 21 days to move out, however, the girl insisted that at midnight our lease was up and that they would call the police to have us escorted out. I explained that my husband didn't even get off work until midnight and that if they continued to do this, they would be forcing us to sleep in a uhaul without our belongings(To be clear, we never intended to stay past the date that we chose to end our lease. We had intended to either sleep in the u haul or find a hotel after we finished removing our belongings which I did not anticipate would take as long as it did, however, I fully expected we would at least have the rest of the night to move out as we had no intention of maintaining contact with them any more than was necessary.) To this, he shrugged and walked away. I called him back and told him that he cannot keep our belongings and that he had to allow us to remove them. He claimed that nothing would be touched, moved, or harmed and that he would be in contact with us the next day when he completed his “errands” (read: changing the locks). I continued packing, and at midnight, a grabbed the essentials that I had set aside. The guy yelled at me to leave, so I did. I was later told that at midnight the girl stood at the door and refused to allow my friend in so that he could help me. I was only allowed to take out the two bags that I could carry. My friend and I waited in the uhaul for my husband to get home from work and then I fully explained to him what happened. He encouraged me to call the police and explain the situation. I did, with the hope that someone would come just to let us remove the rest of our belongings, and then we could leave, however, they informed us that even if they sent a keep the peace officer, if they did not want to let us in, there was nothing that we could do. The officer on the phone told me that I should consider working it out privately with them and that if that did not work, we should get a court order to be allowed back in to remove our belongings. At this point, I tried for two hours to find a hotel room open that we could stay at, but there were none in the area, so my offered to let us sleep at his apartment. Here’s how the “real” move out day went down: The next day, we got the go ahead to move into our new place. My husband went to work and my friend and I went to the new apartment and got the keys. We waited in the apartment for hours for the guy to contact us. I texted him explaining that we had family that was trying to come to help us move, but that they had a five hour drive and therefore, we needed a time in order to arrange them helping us move out. He was uncooperative. My husband got off of work and we decided to meet at a restaurant near the old apartment to wait for them to let us in. When it became apparent that we were not going to be allowed in, we decided to take my friend home. When we came back, we went to the u haul to try to get another set of clothes out for ourselves for the next day. I tried once again to ask them to let us in, reminding him that we didn’t have any food and that I needed some of my belongings for the next day. At around 9pm, he told us that we could come in for fifteen minutes to get our essentials. We knocked on the door and it was immediately opened (really, you were waiting at the door?), and we were stopped and they told us that they did not want any confrontations. We went in, took of our shoes in a respect for their rules, and grabbed valuables, such as banking information (because I did not trust that information to be in the apartment out of fear that they would try to use it), some food, clothes, and my student teaching materials. The whole time, the guy followed us around the apartment in a very threatening way, pushing his chest out and flexing his arms by his side. He asked us to remove our food from the fridge that we shared in the kitchen and then walked away, but I called him back and explained that we did not have a refrigerator to put the food in. When I said this, he and the girl both looked at the mini fridge in our room which they had turned off in our absence even though we had paid for electricity through the end of the month. They said that they would allow us to keep the things in the kitchen refrigerator. We later had to throw out anything that was in the mini fridge because it had been spoiled (way to not harm our stuff). While we were inside, we noticed that our internet cable had been taken down, balled up, and left on one of our shelves in our room. They had claimed that they wouldn't touch, move, or harm any of our belongings, they did all three. They had also promised to contact us as soon as they were done with their errands which they obviously did not because they had taken the time to remove the cable and shower and do whatever else they did all day. The guy claimed that he would be in contact with us the next day so that we could remove more of our belongings. We were followed to the door and it was promptly closed and locked behind us. I contacted work told them that I would not be able to come in to the next day and explained the situation and that at any time I could be contacted and I needed to be there to remove my belongings. My husband and I drove back to our new apartment and slept that night on the floor. I was in contact with my dad who told me that his brother, a lawyer, was working with a colleague on figuring out exactly what our rights were in this situation and that my uncle would be happy to help me. After that conversation, I texted the guy saying that if we were not able to get in at a reasonable time the next day I was going to begin the process of obtaining a court order. The next day, I texted the guy again and told him that I would be starting the process of obtaining a court order that day and that my lawyer would be advising me further. He texted me about twenty minutes later (how funny that after I decide to get a court order and involve my lawyer he suddenly becomes cooperative). He told us that we could come from 6-11 pm to pick up our things. I agreed and we immediately began making phone calls. My husband called his work and took the day off since he was scheduled during that time, I contacted my in-laws and asked them to help us move out, and they got ready and drove the five hours to help us. Since the move out time was scheduled for after hours, I called the old apartment leasing office and asked if we could get an extension on our parking permit for the u haul to which they agreed, letting us stay there until that Wednesday and letting us know to come back in if we needed another extension since everyone in the office seemed to be familiar and sympathetic to our situation. We called the u haul company and rented the U-Haul for another day since we were supposed to return it by 2pm that day. At 6pm, my husband, myself, my mother-in-law, father-in-law, and brother-in-law knocked on the door. Again, we were told that they did not want a confrontation and let us in. Again, we took off our shoes out of respect for their rules and we began moving things as quickly as we could out onto the sidewalk just so that we could ensure that nothing would remain in the apartment. The guy again followed us around the house in a threatening way. Once, my mother-in-law accidentally touched the computer to the mirrored closet and the girl pushed me out of the way to inspect the noise. The guy constantly walked around to check on our progress and several times I had to wait for him to move out of the way so that I could move past him to get to more of our things. We finished getting everything out within two hours. I refrained from explaining that this could have been done Saturday night if they had allowed us two to three more hours (since we had less people). We left our keys on the counter even though the locks had been changed and we quickly left and moved our belongings into our new apartment.
Submitted August 30, 2015 at 06:55AM by jrcampbe http://ift.tt/1JpCLDC badroommates
No comments:
Post a Comment