Flat/house renting horror stories (1 Viewer)

[potlatch]

In my weekly 'something must be done'/back-to-stupid-work mood, there's been some scary shit in the Irish Times today about the state of rented accomodation in Ireland.

Looks like the majority of rented accomodation in Ireland doesn't meet minimum standards - 78% of places in Dublin rented by people on rent supplement failed inspection.

And if you're not a member of the 'at risk of poverty' population, you still have shit gaffs, leaks, squeaks, creaks, mildew, weak tenants' rights, high and unpredictable rent, no long-term leases and you generally have to put up with some redfaced landlord's style of interior decoration. And of the 6,800 properties inspected by some dudes, only 11 landlords saw legal proceedings taken against them

So what's the worst you've ever seen/lived in?

For me, it's probably a bedsit in one of those tenaments on Upper Leeson St. - a tiny room with no heating, the window frame had nearly rotted away, silverfish building themselves a little city unter the flowery wallpaper, shared bathroom and stove burner, whole house smelled of rotting corpses.

Oh, the humanity.

 

[HMD]

there's a prime time special on it tonight i think.

 

[classic seanc]

Living over a takeaway was rough. I was a 21 year old student.
I often got into arguements with the takeaway owner because of the noise. I later found out the takeaway owner once killed a 21 year old student that he got into an arguement with. That was a bit freaky.

 

[pete]

there's a prime time special on it tonight i think.

looks pretty horrific from the promo

 

[SONYMEGADRIVE]

Living over a takeaway was rough. I was a 21 year old student.
I often got into arguements with the takeaway owner because of the noise. I later found out the takeaway owner once killed a 21 year old student that he got into an arguement with. That was a bit freaky.

portobello / road rage?

 

[Ellie_M]

I lived with a crowed of drug dealers above a internet cafe in the smallest room in the world that smelt like rotting rat.

 

[classic seanc]

portobello / road rage?

Yes

 

[SONYMEGADRIVE]

knew a guy that worked there...heard a few stories
pre-murder and all that...

 

[Froog]

lived in a house where the rubbish made a foot thick layer in the living room. that was our fault tho. also was at party before where rubbish hadn't been collected for four months, just sat in a huge mountain in the garden, complete with various warring factions of rats. also not the house's fault. never really lived in a complete kip, couple of pokey places alright.

 

[nofunchee]

i lived in a gaff in cabra park in phibsboro that was a total hole. the ancient landlady and her decrepit old husband (who couldn't go upstairs) thought it was grand to enter the house whenever and carry out their own repairs. her reply to the incredible mould problem was to kick the mushrooms off the carpet in the hall out the back door saying "right you are", which was her favourite expression.

the place was always falling apart. my mates lived upstairs and had their bathroom closed for a month for diy repairs to a leaky shower. the landlady used to come in and wake people up looking for rent and the 'lease' was a photocopy of a badly hand-written set of conditions, that included a one week notice period for getting kicked out. i gave her one week notice when i was leaving and she went mad.

my room was a dark damp little mould-ridden box with a dripping kitchen sink and shelves put into a built-in wardrobe with the doors taken off. beside it was a shite cooker. i lived with one other person who had to come into my room to make food. no washing machine, no heating. 50 quid a week.

good times!

 

[egg_]

Mrs. egg_ lived in 2 different flats in Roebuck Hall behind UCD (since done up apparently). One had no floor covering (just bare untreated floorboards), no lock on the door, and when the kitchen window fell out the landlord boarded it up rather than replace it. In the other the front door opened directly into her bedroom, and you had to go through another bedroom to get to the kitchen.

Yes, she foolishly paid rent in these places. Cheap though

 

[egg_]

John-out-of-Stoat once lived in a place ("the bedsit" mentioned in 59 Dame St., for those of you familiar with the Stoat opus) that leaked very badly - there were plastic bowls suspended in orange nets nailed to the ceiling to catch the water, whatever good that was supposed to do I don't know. Shared bathroom with no shower, just a bath a flower seller who lived across the hall kept full of roses. He (john, not the flower seller) used to come over to my place to wash. 14 quid a week.

 

[Lolo]

I lived in some freezing, mouldy, unsafe kips in my time, in various parts of Dublin 8, but the most horrible time I've had was moving into my current flat in London.

The landlord lied to us saying there was bike storage and access to an outdoor space that doesn't belong to him. The previous tenants lied to us about havig a cat, and even though I told them I'm highly allergic to them, they didn't bother hoovering before they left.

So I did it myself, hatching a multitude of flea eggs in the process. Found out I'm also highly allergic to flea bites too. The place was hopping with them (we still find their little corpses in books and record sleeves occasionally a year later). Landlord did pay for cut-price pest control but it didn't work, I had to shell out for Rentokil myself. The whole thing went on for more than a month, I couldn't unpack much for fear of my belongings getting flea-infested.

I was so traumatised and broke I couldn't face moving again. Oh yes, my landlord is slightly famous English soap actor, not naming any names after the Borderline incident...

 

[carbide]

one of the places my current housemate went to see was a three-bed apartment with no windows. an expensive three-bed, at that.

my aunt rented this place in london for about ten years, and when she and her partner first moved in, the landlady and her in-the-process-of-becoming-ex-husband had just left. the locks had been changed to keep him out. anyway, it was a nice place, and they were settling in but couldn't seem to get rid of a weird smell in the bedroom, even after changing the mattress and cleaning the curtains. turned out he'd been staying there before the locks had changed, was an alcoholic, and would go to bed locked every night and puke over the side of the bed onto the same patch, which had built up and then had the bed put over it.

i've nothing to compare, really, aside from the obvious note that if your landlord's company is called t.ornado construction and he's doing the repairs, the collapsing, mouldy, damp stuff shouldn't be a revelation...

 

[nlgbbbblth]

grim place in Ranelagh, 1994.
bedsit.

motley crew of tenants in other flats included
- three separate heroin addicts
- highly aggressive paranoid lady mid 50s whose father kipped on her floor.

as I was kind enough to lend my bike to the addicts they did me the favour of not breaking into my flat. They just did everyone else's.

rent was around 38 quid a week.

shared bathroom - not pleasant.

 

[Space]

i lived in a gaff in cabra park in phibsboro that was a total hole. the ancient landlady and her decrepit old husband (who couldn't go upstairs) thought it was grand to enter the house whenever and carry out their own repairs. her reply to the incredible mould problem was to kick the mushrooms off the carpet in the hall out the back door saying "right you are", which was her favourite expression.

the place was always falling apart. my mates lived upstairs and had their bathroom closed for a month for diy repairs to a leaky shower. the landlady used to come in and wake people up looking for rent and the 'lease' was a photocopy of a badly hand-written set of conditions, that included a one week notice period for getting kicked out. i gave her one week notice when i was leaving and she went mad.

my room was a dark damp little mould-ridden box with a dripping kitchen sink and shelves put into a built-in wardrobe with the doors taken off. beside it was a shite cooker. i lived with one other person who had to come into my room to make food. no washing machine, no heating. 50 quid a week.

good times!

I think I remember that gaff.

 

[Jill Hives]

2004 -- 650 a month in Boston.

A 4 bedroom house with no lock on the front door. At any given time some random person would be drinking at the kitchen table. Bottles, takeaway wrappers and coke dust everywhere. I lived there for 4 months before moving. My room was the cleanest (after lots of scrubbing) and I would need to barricade the door when I slept because coked out idiots would stumble in thinking it was the bathroom.

Once a week some dude (who onece lived in my room) would throw his cat out of the car window in front of the house and then drive off. The cat would kill mice. Me being allergic to cats, never let it in my room. Needless to say, all the mice came to my room. I had left my last place (in another state) in a hurry and only brought what could fit in a car. I was sleeping on a blow up mattress because I left my bed behind. I could never sleep though, especially after I woke up one morning to a mouse eating a lollipop (right next to my head) that it must have gotten from my purse. Longest four months ever.

I imagined it being close to the Motley Crue house in LA. I kept toilet roll hidden in my room and brought my laptop with me to work.

 

[taubstumm]

I had left my last place (in another state) in a hurry and only brought what could fit in a car.

fill us in on the details here

 

[Jill Hives]

fill us in on the details here

Boring, relationship gone wrong, so I'd jet scenario. Applied for a job in secret, accepted it, packed up my stuff and then said goodbye. Quick like a ripping off a bandaid.

 

[taubstumm]

Boring, relationship gone wrong, so I'd jet scenario. Applied for a job in secret, accepted it, packed up my stuff and then said goodbye. Quick like a ripping off a bandaid.

it'll make for a jaunty chapter in your memoirs