375: An Apartment Story

"The rent here may be low, but I believe we have it on very hard terms."
-Marianne Dashwood, Sense & Sensibility (the movie, not the book)

Most everyone has a period of their lives when, either out of frugality or necessity, they live in a sub-par apartment.

This is my story.

Soon after Seara was born we found out that everyone was being kicked out of our apartment complex. At that same time Sam decided to go free-lance with his art work and we no longer had a steady, reliable income. So, we began our search for the perfect dirt-cheap apartment. And we found it. A two-bedroom basement apartment for $375 a month. We moved in March 1st.

I should have known something was wrong when, before we moved in, I rented a carpet cleaner and after a dozen times cleaning the carpets the water was still coming up black as tar. I shrugged it off. The place was cheap.

Soon I started noticing that just about everything in the apartment was falling apart. The upper cupboards in the kitchen leaned forward precariously, ready to pulverize an unsuspecting passerby. The sprinklers outside hit the few windows we had and filled the window wells with water, so the apartment manager covered the window wells with sheets of metal, thereby taking away our only source of natural light. The air conditioning didn't work, so as summer came the coolest the apartment ever got was about 80 degrees ... and that was at five in the morning. The whole apartment smelled putrid no matter what I did. And in the upper corners of the room I could see mold inching in, threatening to take over the apartment.

And then there were the red, itchy spots that started appearing on my body when I'd wake up in the morning. They came to a head one night at about two in the morning when I, mostly asleep, reached back to itch my back and felt something crush and ooze between my fingers. I screamed and Sam woke to inspect. Spiders.

We fumigated the apartment. We couldn't even go inside for three days. We expected the problem to be gone when we got back. It wasn't. Apparently the windows weren't sealed well and all sorts of creepy crawlies were constantly getting into the apartment.

After a few weeks there we got the flu. We were sick. Really sick. For twenty days straight I never once left that dark, dank, windowless, mold-growing, spider infested apartment. Sam and Seara got better, but for weeks I did not. Sam figured it out before I did. Baby two was on its way. What morning sickness I already suffered from was amplified by the squalor.

Then one day, as I was getting Seara out of her crib, I noticed something just outside the window above her crib. Nestled into the corner of the window well was a large, black spider. And on her back were large, red dots. A black widow.

We needed to move. Fast.

Miracle of all miracles, while calling around I found an apartment complex that needed an apartment manager. I'd be in charge of showing people my apartment at the semester start, sweeping the walks each week, and doing cleaning checks in the 11 other apartments at the semester end. In return, we'd get the last apartment for $375 a month with free utilities, free internet, and free cable. It had two large bedrooms, tons of storage, huge windows, a new kitchen, and it was CLEAN. We moved in July 29th.

I couldn't have found a faster solution for depression. Everything in my world suddenly felt so happy and light. But those five months in our basement apartment weren't fruitless. They taught me a very important lesson:

Just because it's cheap doesn't mean it's worth it.