Cassidy Herbst
1/5
*I’m sorry I know this is long, but I promise it’s got a lot of very important information*
I rented a dry cabin for about 6 months a little bit ago, and it was nothing but disaster after disaster. I had first looked at a different home, but they ended up giving it to someone else. They wanted to rent to me though, so they offered me a different home that wasn’t listed anywhere. Looking back, I know now that’s because they KNEW just how bad it was. I was incredibly wary when looking at it, but I had been looking for so long, I was ready to give up, and it was cheap.
When I first moved in, the walls were graffitied all over by the previous tenant. I didn’t mind, because I love to paint homes (and that’s what I did. I painted over all the graffiti and made the place presentable all on my own dime). An outlet was not working, a window wasn’t secured in the wall, and there was a hole in the bedroom ceiling that I was slightly worried about because it looked moldy. They assured me the ceiling wasn’t an issue, and they fixed the outlet and window fairly quickly.
Come winter time, I realized the windows were only single pane (one was plexiglass), and the door was crooked, and leaking air out INCREDIBLY quickly. Just to keep the house at a comfortable temperature and not -20, I went through an entire 20 gallon tank of propane within two weeks. I put in a request, and got no response. After some time, I messaged the landlord and was told nobody would be out soon, because they had fallen behind on paying their maintenance crew, and they were refusing to fix homes until they got caught up on payments. They eventually did come out, but the “fix” did not fix the issue. So I ended up having to fix it myself in -40 degree weather. Even after, I ended up not running my propane heater as much and instead had to constantly run two plug in heaters at all times to keep my cats from freezing while I was gone, and had a heated blanket at night because the bedroom was insulated even less (if at all).
I thought winter was bad though, SPRING was a thing of nightmares. EVERY wall was leaking. My ceiling was leaking in multiple places including (shocker) the hole in the ceiling I had questioned prior. I had buckets everywhere, and was soaking through towels like nobodies business. And in a dry cabin, that’s not a simple solvable problem. I had run out of clean towels by day 2. I had put in a request, and got NOTHING in return. And when I had messaged the landlord to ask about it, I got nothing back. I put in ANOTHER request not long after, because obviously, all the leaks had caused more mold to grow. The entire back door (that was sealed shut with spray foam because the back steps were completely rotted out) was covered in black mold. I still to this day have never heard anything back in regards to either of those issues.
I did end up talking to one of my neighbors at one point who told me he had been asking them to fix his leaking roof for FIVE YEARS because it was molding and they never did anything. I ended up becoming incredibly sick. So much so that I had to call out of work so often that I lost my job two months before I could move out.
There were also no fire alarms or CO2 detectors, and I was told it would take too long to get someone out to do it, and if it was important to me that I could go out and pay for them myself and get it taken out of rent (but have you seen the price of those things? It was either that or food for the week).
Granted, my rent was cheap. However, after rent, propane, and electric, and the costs associated with fixing things that they wouldn’t, I was basically paying the same amount for a nice studio apartment in town. And even so, NOTHING can excuse the lack of respect for their tenants and responsibility towards their homes. NOBODY should be subject to living in a biohazard just because we can’t afford something nicer.
