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- R and I have slowly been working on changing things around in the apartment, to clear more space and better organize things so things we need are easier to access and things we don't are more out of the way, on storage shelves. Then hopefully, when R passes the driving test and gets a license and we get a car, we can clear a bunch of packed boxes into our storage unit, freeing up the rest of the space in here. That's the point where we'll be talking to the landlord about the issues we've had with the upstairs neighbour. We're waiting until then because at the moment, we and the neighbour agreed that we could take her larger storage room in the building because she didn't need 2, and we got a lot of packages with things for review and needed to hold onto them for 6+ months in case of recalls. She agreed to let us use it, which is awesome and we're appreciative, but we both fear that if we talk to the landlord about the problems we're having, she'll want her storage room back, just out of spite. So we want our stuff gone from it so we can just say, "Okay, all our stuff is already gone from it," and she won't have anything to hold over us.
Sadly, experiences in our lives have kind of primed us for thinking this far ahead, setting things up well in advance so that people can't turn around and go back on their word in ways that end up hurting us.
- For the record, what we want to talk to the landlord about us: the upstairs neighbour frequently just leaves loads of laundry in the machines for a day, sometimes multiple days, without doing anything, forcing us to either move her half-finished laundry so we can do ours, or just continue to delay doing our laundry. She's in charge of snow removal from the driveway, but has a habit of only removing enough snow so that she can get to the front door, whereas our apartment only has access from the backdoor. She leaves random crap at the top of the stairs leading to the back door, such as baskets of laundry, random garbage she doesn't want to deal with yet, a vacuum cleaner, etc, making it a fire hazard because the stuff half blocks the exit, or a trip hazard. She has a large dog which we're not sure she's even supposed to have, given that I haven't seen it at all and R's only seen it twice, both time furtively moved out of sight once they realized the dog was spotted (this hasn't stopped the dog from barking super loud when we leave the apartment, dog toys from being left in the back yard, a leash being in clear view, and for a while, the leash also being left at the back door in a way that often resulted in me nearly tripping over it. We had lawn chairs and some gardening tools that we left out back a couple of times, because we were using them frequently and didn't want the hassle of carrying a bunch of stuff downstairs, and both apartments leave stuff out back, so we figured it was fine; I guess she figured that meant they were up for grabs and anyone could use them, whether or not she got permission. She provides the Internet, and she took over 2 weeks after moving in to even do that, but the Internet is shitty, frequently stops working (R needs it for work, teaching classes), and we discovered that both apartments share the same IP, which means we get "delightful" ads for weird sex toys and rauchy t-shirt designs every time her boyfriend comes over... When her kids are over, they are loud. Like, running around and yelling after 11 PM loud, which has prevented us from sleeping on more than one occasion. It was actually such a night that kept me awake enough that I ended up spinning into this pain and fatigue flare, so her lackluster parenting and inability to either watch her kids or tell them to quiet down has actually damaged my health for over 2 months now. I don't expect her to know this in particular, but I do expect her to maybe remind her kids that yelling a bunch so late at night might be a problem for the people who live literally right below them. She randomly left a slow cooker pot full of food rotting in a garbage bag, in the middle of summer, right outside the outside faucet that I use every day to water my vegetable garden. For 2. Freaking. Months!
So you can imagine just how eager we are to get our stuff in order so we can tell the landlord and put a stop to this.
- As it is, we're already trying to figure out how we can afford our own Internet service, even though Internet is technically included in our rent, even though she's technically providing some service, because it's unreliable service and is actually affecting the things R and I both do for work. The rental agreement doesn't specify that she has to provide a particular quality of Internet access, but the way things are, so long as R continues to teach from home, we need something better than what she's providing, and we kind of need to talk to the landlord to find out if our rent will be reduced if we get our own Internet service, since what's being provided isn't good enough. If so, great, that's a little bit of money we can put toward our own service. If not... we may have to skip a meal or two, let's just put it that way.
