Evidence of the fun we had July 5, 2007
Posted by charmingbutsingle in College was Fun, Friends, General Clumsiness and Related Stupidity, Really. Bad. Habits..trackback
I was helping my brother and his fiancée clean their apartment and load their moving truck today, which is something I cannot yet write about, as the realization that my younger brother will suddenly be a more than 10-hour drive away from me as opposed to a five-minute drive from me has not yet set in and I’m really not in the mood to cry. Again.
As I crawled across the floor wiping down their baseboards – my brother’s fiancée had a long checklist of things to clean in order to ensure that their full deposit was returned – I was reminded of moving out of one of my college apartments.
College Roommate and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment near enough to campus and our favorite bars. We were party girls for sure. We hosted a few small parties and a slew of late-night, post-bar, pre-dawn gatherings. We were young and social. It was not uncommon for us to get visitors even on nights when we stayed in and watched TV. And our apartment refrigerator and pantry were stocked with our favorites – cranberry juice, boxed wine, Pasta Roni, bottom shelf vodka, Chinese food (leftover from Sex and the City marathons) and half-pints of ice cream (ditto).
We made the somewhat critical mistake of letting our friends smoke the occasional cigarette in our living room. (We might have smoked a few ourselves.) We foolishly thought this smell would somehow go unnoticed and that somehow traipsing intoxicated 20somethings through the place at all hours of the night would not lead to lasting spills or stains.
We were wrong.
A few weeks after we moved out of the apartment, we received our deposit check and a letter outlining why exactly the more than $300 we’d paid in a deposit had been whittled to only $36.
“You would not believe why we didn’t get more of our deposit back,” College Roommate told me over the phone.
“We cleaned the place up, I said. “Kind of.”
“First reason? Heavy smoke smell,” she said.
“Eh, I’ll give them that. We did let people smoke in there,” I said. “Is there another reason?”
“Yeah. Red stains on the carpet,” she said.
We paused.
“Vodka and cranberry?”
“Yep.”
“Well, we’re pretty predictable, aren’t we?”
“It is our signature drink!”
The fun was worth it though, right?
Makes me remember moving into my first apartment… totally did NOT get the deposit back at all. Ugh.
It’s funny what can trigger memories. Usually at the most unexpected time, too.
I just got a letter from my old landlord saying that not only was I not getting my security deposit back, I owed them 3,000 dollars.
The reasoning being that my dog chewed a piece of the carpet (literally about a half inch spot in the corner of the room) and now they had to re-carpet the whole place.
I’m surprised the smoke smell stayed… open windows and febreeze
Well at least you enjoyed that deposit! Good times!
My sister was once sued because of a small red stain on the counter from cheap hawaiian when I once made Jungle Juice… SUPPOSEDLY he had to replace the entire counter… The judge threw it out as soon as his “receipt” was proven to have been typed himself in MS Word…
Ah, memories. But you just can’t win on those deposits. My last place deducted $20, no explanation. When I went to return the keys, I found they’d gutted the place, top to bottom, for a complete makeover. How my $20 was required, I’ll never know…
I linked here from another blog and just love this post. It reminds me of the place I lived in Charleston - a charming old house complete with 5 roommates, intermittently heavy smoke smell, and occasional vodka spill.
Thanks for the stroll down memory lane!
Aaaaaahhhhh…to be young and carefree again. lol
Love the blog. I read it everyday.
rental deposits are meant to be stolen by unscruplous landlords. you just kinda have to know that going in.
Landlords are always trying to hustle people. He used your drinking problem against you when he should have been kind and understanding.
One time, my landlord had a huge problem with a giant burn mark on my hardwood floor. The one time my roommate ironed somthing, it fell off the ironing board and fell onto the floor, creating a perfect iron sized black burn. I thought it gave the house character, but we got charged bigtime for it.
Ugh! Landlords are awful! We lost our $200 apartment deposit as well as my $250 pet deposit. Then I had to pay $187 for them to replace the carpet. All of that to replace the carpet in the not-so-big living room? As if!