Apartment Living

Recently my husband and I moved out of an apartment and into a cute little beach cottage. The moving process was… terrible. Moving is said to be one of the worst stressors for a human, and I swear I feel like I have aged considerably this past week. Because my husband and I are superheroes, we were able to move all of our things in one afternoon… but not without cost. I woke up with a back of someone in their mid seventies and was literally creaking every time I moved. Moving is a bit of a bitch, I hope that doesn’t offend anyone, but I think it’s safe to say that it is appropriate in this context. But there is something much worse than moving… apartment living.

Granted, I live in southern California in a town that I love, but that I must admit can be a bit on the snooty side. The apartment complex we were living at was no exception. When I went to the leasing office to ask what they wanted the apartment to look like after we moved out, I was informed that I was expected to pay for the place to be professionally cleaned and for the carpets to be professionally washed, along with a new paint job. Umm… no.

How is one expected to live in an apartment? No touching the walls, take your shoes off outside the door, please. Oh and don’t put anything in the fridge, it’s just for looks. Am I supposed to float over the carpet while I live there? Put cushions on the floor and play “hot lava” like I did when I was a kid, jumping from cushion to table, from table to couch, just to ensure the floors look like new for decades? And to make matters worse, the rent is so shockingly high that I am fairly sure that one month’s rent at this place could hire a cleaning crew to clean the place five times and there would still be money left over. Sadly, money that a young military couple doesn’t have.

So I cleaned the place myself, I washed the base boards, the walls, the floors; everything you can possibly imagine was scrubbed and scrubbed again. I should have invested in Windex and Lysol before I began, because I could have made a fortune. However, I was thwarted by my vacuum. Who decided to stop working after only one room was done, and then proceeded to give me the finger by almost burning the carpet too (it didn’t, but it was a close call). So stubborn me, still determined to do it myself, got down on my hands and knees and searched the apartment inch by inch for every spec k I could find on the floor. It was not fun, but I won! And then came the garage. On the last day of cleaning after about four days of trying to make sure this place was spotless for the final inspection, I decided it would probably be a good idea to mop the garage. And it was, until I saw a pretty gross looking spot on the wall. Since we had moved everything to our new place, the only thing available to scrub this spot with was the mop. Let this be a lesson, mops are not scrubbies, they are not rags, and they can do nothing but scrub floors. As I started to scrub the stain it started to look worse, I thought perhaps I hadn’t gotten the mop clean enough and proceeded to wash it. Oh how wrong I was. I came back to the spot and began again, only to find that what I was actually doing was rubbing the paint right off the walls. What was just a square inch spot was now two feet of an ugly mess.

*Deep Breath*

I am done with apartment living.

-RS