And... time to go.

I haven’t had the best luck with apartments. Granted, I adored the apartment I lived in my senior year in college, but since then things have gone downhill.

My apartments have always looked good on the surface. My first apartment in Chicago was on the first floor of a 2-flat house. It had a well-lit living room, a deck out back, and even in-unit laundry. AND my bedroom was the largest in the house. However, the washer was continually out of service, the backyard was plagued with rats late at night, and the house itself eventually became infested with mice. My landlord neglected the mice so long that they became bold enough to wander around in my bedroom in the middle of the day, as I sat there watching. Also, I had roommates who, at the time, spent a lot of nights at bars and brought home a lot of strangers.

I was relieved when I moved out of there and into my grad school apartment. It was the first apartment I had all to myself, and I was really excited about it! It was on the second floor of a three-unit building, and had its own entrance. The space was small but charming, with a staircase immediately when you walked in and cute loft area where I put my desk. Unfortunately, my pre-move-in tours neglected to reveal two key things. First, there was a vent between my kitchen and the kitchen in the apartment next door that allowed me to hear EVERY WORD my neighbors said, no matter where I was in the apartment. And I don’t mean murmuring – I heard everything with perfect clarity. Second, the living room was actually built outside of the building. It was once a porch but had been enclosed, which meant it was poorly insulated and unlivable in the winter. Once, I literally had to get in the shower to return the feeling to my feet.

After I finished my master’s, I moved into the studio where I live now, and sadly, this apartment is the worst of the bunch. The floor is uneven, so none of my furniture sits flat. The wiring is sketchy, so if I touch the lights on my ceiling fan they sometimes stop working. My mailbox is always left unlocked for no apparent reason. The speaker I’m supposed to use to talk to people buzzing to get in has never worked, and the maintenance guy flat-out told me he wouldn’t fix it. My toilet plugs about every tenth flush. And my refrigerator makes a very loud noise every time the cooling mechanism turns off. Although I am used to it now, it used to wake me up at night, and still makes visitors jump out of their skin.

It should come as no surprise that I’ve considered moving many times. Several things have stopped me in the past, though. First and foremost, I love my location. There is a Walgreens across the street, a grocery store 3 blocks away, and hundreds of other stores and restaurants within walking distance. I’m less than two blocks from the brown line, and less than ten blocks from the red line. There’s a bus that runs from two blocks away from my office to the corner right outside my apartment. I’ve got my whole life down to a science, living here, and I really like my neighborhood.

That’s the main reason I’ve resisted moving. There’s also the fact that the search for apartments is a giant pain, and the cost of hiring movers can be steep. Before this apartment, I had not lived in the same place for more than a year in seven years. Although this place has its faults, I’ve learned to make do, and I was tired of messing with the status quo. So for year, I put up with the uneven floors, unlocked mailbox, flickering lights, and noisy fridge without much complaint. Then I resigned a lease despite a rent increase, and thought I would be ok for another year. I’m six months into the new lease now, and I’ve started to think about moving again. I have plenty of reasons to do so, but I was dragging my feet on committing to it. After all, I don’t exactly have a great history with apartments, and how do I know the next one won’t be worse?

But after this week, I’m not sure it’s possible for the next one to be worse. Last Wednesday, I was home only briefly after work to change my clothes, and then I left for a speed workout. Afterward, at about 8:30 pm, I walked down the hall towards my apartment, looking forward to a relaxing few hours before bed. It was not to be.

When I opened the door, I heard water running in the kitchen. I had a fleeting thought that I may have left the tap on, but came around the corner to see water pouring out from under the sink. I shrieked and started messing with the valves, and luckily was able to at least stop the flow of water temporarily. There was over an inch of standing water in the cabinet under the sink, and maybe a quarter inch on the kitchen floor. The bag of recycling and the paper bags of cat food that were under the sink had almost disintegrated, and the cat herself? She was a little damp, and yowling as she looked at me disdainfully.

I called the maintenance guy, and he was there almost immediately, as he had already been fielding a call from the guy who lives below me, who had noticed water dripping into his apartment through the ceiling. (Though it’s not my fault, I feel a little bad about that.) The maintenance guy sopped up the standing water and did something to the valves that he thought would make them hold until morning, provided that I didn’t use the sink. He came back the next day to replace the valves.

It was not the mini-flood itself that got me thinking about moving again. Instead, it was a comment the maintenance guy muttered to himself as he fussed with the valves. As he knelt in the standing water, bracing himself for a potential drenching, he muttered, “This building is falling apart.”

He’s right, of course. The thing about all the problems with this building is that they are not isolated or unrelated. They are all marks of a decaying building that may be beyond saving at this point. Logic says to jump this ship before it sinks completely.

Even after all this, though, I considered staying. Even after all this, I resisted the thought of change and the pains of moving.

But finally, something happened that officially pushed me over the edge. At the beginning of the month, new neighbors (two younger guys) moved into the apartment next door. For the last three nights, they have come home from bars at three in the morning and proceeded to be irritatingly loud for at least an hour. I tolerated this reasonably well at first, as I had a lot of practice tuning out noise both with my first Chicago roommates and my grad school apartment’s thin walls.

Then I saw them. On Thursday evening, the new neighbors came in the back door and climbed the stairs toward their apartment as I was doing laundry in the stairwell area. I listened to them talking as they walked by, and their conversation centered around one of them doing his hair at 3 am and not being able to wake up the other, who had passed out drunk. (Wow. Lovely.)

I climbed the stairs to my apartment to find them standing outside theirs, fumbling to find their keys. As my opened my door and my cat meowed a greeting, I heard one of my new neighbors do a sarcastic, patronizing impression of her. I entered my apartment without looking at him and leaned against the closed door as I fumed. Drink til you pass out? Fine, it’s your life. Be a loud asshole on your way to doing so, waking up the whole building in the process? Fine. You’ll be kicked out if you keep it up and people complain. But make fun of my cat? You just crossed the line, buddy. You’re on my list.

It was at that moment, as I stood there leaning against the door, that I knew it was time to go. Not only is this building too old to live in, I’m too old to live in this building.