Horrible Experience

About a month ago I moved into a new house in St. Louis Park, MN. When I looked at the place a few months ago with my roommates, it was easily the cleanest and most pristine house that we had looked at when shopping around for a place to live. We were so impressed that we made the decision the day of looking at the place that we would lease it.

A little more than a month later we came to move in and expected everything to be in just as wonderful of shape as before, but we were terribly wrong. The place was an utter sty with nothing cleaned up and the house basically unlivable until we took care of the crappiness that had come to infest it within the last month. And to make matters worse, the person we were renting it from was in Iowa, never showed up to collect the papers, and was basically unreachable the entire time.

What kind of landlord is not going to be around to collect his check, make sure the people moving in are, and take care of switching everything over? Obviously not ours. Seems like he couldn't give two shits about anything. I can get into more of his ridiculous antics later, but for now I want to show you all the pictures I took to document how shoddy the house was when we arrived. If you want to see higher resolution versions of the pictures below, they're all in this flickr set.


Let's start with what we found in one of the closets. You'll see that the panel has been ripped off and there's some wonderful garbage on the floor. I wonder why the panel got ripped off? Actually, I wonder more why when whoever was doing whatever they were doing didn't put it back on when they were done.

Ahh, moving right on to the garage (sorry for the haphazard ordering but I'm just following my Flickr stream). As you can see there is no way in hell we'd be able to put a car or anything else in the garage with all that garbage. It was a pile of sheetrock, magazines in boxes, wood scraps, and other junk.

Here's a look at the other side of the garage with junk still on the shelves. You can also see that there's some old doors and refuse towards the back of the garage. I guess we should have looked closer into the garage before we took the place, but I figured when we were there looking that the crap was in the garage as they were in the process of moving.

When you look at the garage from a little further away you'll also see the bags of wet, gross mulch that they had left in the driveway. They stunk, were all wet & icky, and weighed a ton.

Here you can see that only one of the lights works. No doubt we just need to put a new bulb in it, but regarless of what we have to do it was annoying to have some parts of the house only partially functional (just wait, there's more than just a light that doesn't work).

Here you'll see that they left lawn chairs, a fire thingy, and lots of ishy leaf piles by the back porch. Again, it was obviously too much for them to take some of their stuff with them or clean up in the least.

On the porch it was even worse as they left a crappy ass charcoal grill, boxes of gross-ness, more bags of garbage, and planters with dead plants in them. Some people might like to move into a house that has that "already lived in" feel, but this is going to far.

You see how this picture is so dark? The reason for this is that one room in the basement had no power to it. All the outlets and lights were dead. This only just got fixed last week after probably 10 phone calls to JPL Investments (the company we're leasing from), which is basically one dude--Patrick Lonergan. The cobwebs also kind of sucked.

Well look at this! Paint cans and garbage! Guess what else? They're still freakin' there! When we finally got Patrick to get someone to move the garbage out of our place they wouldn't take paint cans because you can't put them in a dumpster and have to have them specially disposed of. At least we moved them all into one closet for now, but it's still ridiculous tha we have to have that shit in our house.

Water spots on the floor. Cute. Obviously there was a leak there at one time. Let's hope it doesn't happen again while we are living there.

Is it too much to ask that light switches and outlets have covers on them? We found multiple switches/outlets without covers or covers that were utterly broken. We ended up having to replace them ourselves. I still haven't given Patrick the bill, but I doubt it's worth the fight for the few dollars, especially considering he's next to impossible to get to return a phone call.

Looks like they forgot some junk when they left. As much as I love having ratty clothes from the 70's in my closet, I'd rather they be mine and not left there by the previous tenant (which just so happened to be Patrick himself along with his wife).

Not content just to leave their clothes in my closet they crammed some old desk in there as well. How truly wonderful. What was even more wonderful is that the people who came to clean crap out refused to take it out so Karl (my roommate) and myself had to carry it out.

Tired of seeing pictures of garbage and crap that was left in the house? Yeah, so were we. It was more and more frustrating to see how much disarray the house was left in when it was vacated.

Tah dah! More junk! They must have really loved their freakin' hangers. There were so many of them in all the closets. Why couldn't they have left cool stuff like comic books or motorcycles or cage dancers? Instead it's hangers and garbage.

You can't really see it in this picture (or in the other bathroom pictures in the Flickr group), but the bathrooms were terribly dirty. The bathtub had pine needles, dirt, and grime in it. The sink had dirt in it. The toilets were a tad bit on the unclean side. It was just gross all around.

Sure, they leave all their garbage and junk but take the curtain rods? And oddly they leave the curtains... We changed out these curtains without rods for some blinds. Are you starting to get the picture of how incompetently cleaned and prepared this place was?

This is one of my favorites! The company that painted the walls decided to paint over all of the cable jacks. When the cable company came out to hook stuff up, they were a tad bit unhappy about it, and had to actually replace the connectors. I also found out that the cable jack in my room can't be hooked up to the cable box so I get no cable in my room. I can only watch DVDs.

The microwave was coated in grime and had some caked on crap on the turntable (which you can see here). I had to scrub like a mofo to get this, the fridge, and the freezer clean, as you'll be able to see in the next picture.

There's still remnants of that orange goop in the freezer because no matter what I did I couldn't get it all to come off. It's some of the most adhesive crap there is. There are a bunch of pictures of the grimy fridge and freezer if you look through the photo set.

Water damage to the carpet. Killer. I didn't remember that being there when we looked at it, but it very well could have been. I don't remember looking too closely at the carpet. I hope the water doesn't leak in again as I now have my tv in the basement.

There's a sliding door for the bedroom in the basement (the one that had no power initially), but the door has no rollers and isn't attached. This is next on my list of things to talk to Patrick about fixing since right now it's just a plank sitting in a lot in the wall. It doesn't work.

Ooohhh, look at that--more crap! More buckets of paint and other assorted garbage that could be thrown out. Unfortunatly we still have the buckets of stuff over with the paint in a corner of our basement.

Yep, you guessed it, even more crap. The paint cans are still in the basement. I'm tempted to pay to have them disposed of and send the bill for it to Patrick, but I doubt he'd do anything about it because he doesn't really seem to care about anything.

Here's a bunch of old, broken blinds and broken lamps and broken other garbage. I'm so glad that he left this stuff instead of getting rid of is so that we could, you know, actually put stuff in this room.

Ahh, Christmas, and we definitely had a lot of presents left for us in the house. It's just too bad that they mostly were equivalent to big, smoking piles of coal. What makes the Christmas tree so special is that Patrick justified its presence by saying it was there when they got there so he thought he'd leave it.

Most of the floor was like this before we dusted it up. There sure isn't anything better than sawdust all over the floor! Man, I don't think I can keep up this dripping sarcasm anymore. It's just too much, so let's just end with another picture of yet more paint cans.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. More stuff left in our basement that couldn't be disposed of so we're expected to deal with it. There really is no better place to rent from than JPL Investments! And just so you know, I'm not serious about that in the least. If you live in Iowa or Minnesota, stay clear of them for sure.

So now you all have a visual tour of the hellishly messy environment I was forced to move into upon getting to the Minneapolis area. I have a feeling the next year is going to be pretty rough whenever anything goes wrong since our landlord doesn't seem to know the first thing about client care. Oh well, it's a learning experience, right?

I really don't think it could possibly get any worse than this in the future when I move into or buy a new place. Seriously, I think I've burned through so much bad karma moving into this place it would be quite a ballsy manuever for the big guy above to put me through the same hellish experience all over again.