2006-07-26 - 8:37 a.m.
Free Furniture (smell hopefully not included)
The good news: The web site overhaul is nearly done. I've got some more pics to load and one more essay to upload, but I can confidently state that the site should be finished before Pennsic. Unless it isn't. You know how it goes. I got another confirmation yesterday that it really pays to be nice to your building maintenance supervisor when you live in an apartment. Our dryer conked out, and the verdict from the Super was that the replacement part would have to be ordered and would take a couple of weeks to arrive. Instead of leaving us with no dryer, he got us a replacement dryer yesterday. Giving your Super home made jam pays off, you see. But even better, on his way out with the broken dryer, he says "you guys like antique-y furniture, don't you?" "yes," I said. Well, it turns out that the people downstairs moved out and left a rather nice china cabinet behind, and would we like it? Despite the fact that we have *no* room for anything else in the apartment, the lure of free, possibly antique furniture was too much, and I said yes, we would like it, we would like it very much. So, he gets the key, and with a warning "it smells a bit", he opened up the apartment so we could inspect the china cabinet. Ick. The apartment was trashed. Not the worst Bob's ever seen, but the Super said it was the worst he'd ever seen at our apartment complex. The people who lived there (who seemed really nice, actually, but we never went in their apartment) apparently felt that house-training their two dogs and one cat was too much trouble, and it seemed like walking the dogs was too much trouble, too, because the beige carpet in the living room? Beige no longer. More of a dark brown with bleached white mould patches, actually. The smell was *intense*, but I seem to have less trouble allergy-wise with nasty animal-excreta smell than I do with perfume, so, while disgusting, I didn't actually react, and was able to actually look at the mess. It was astounding, even apart from the carpet - they left major pieces of furniture, including a stereo, tables, chairs, and piles and piles of trash mixed with clothes and books and the various detritus one accumulates after living in a place for a while (even though they didn't live there that long). The china cabinet was very nice - a friend gave it a look-over later, and said it was solid oak, and probably from the 1920s. I knew as soon as I saw it that it was a decent piece, and now it's in the back of our truck, waiting to go down to the farm this weekend. Hopefully any smell will air out down there. The smell, the trash, the things left behind - and the dumpster is literally fifteen yards from the apartment - I am an innocent in these matters, so until I saw it, it had simply never occurred to me that people would move out of a rented apartment and not clean out all their stuff. I guess they figured the security deposit was gone anyway, so they just took what they wanted and left. This annoys me (mildly - it's not like I'm frothing at the mouth, or anything) for a couple of reasons. One is that our Super is a really nice guy, and he's going to have to clean up that shit-hole. Two, there was a lot of useable stuff left behind - it would kill them to pile it up and call the Salvation Army for a pick-up? The sets of shelves alone would have been incentive for a charity to come and get stuff - they can always use shelves. Part of me wanted to don gloves and a face mask and go sort through everything and pull out the useable stuff, because while I'm not terribly ecologically minded, I am big on not trashing useable items that could benefit someone else (plus, I like the tax write-off). Most of me knows how silly that thought is, and probably it will all be in the dumpster by the time I get home today. At least we got a nice china cabinet out of it. Bob really does swear it isn't the worst he's ever seen - when he was a deputy sheriff, he worked evictions, and he says this was nothing - no human waste, no stopped toilets, holes in the walls, or smashed windows. I have to admit, that while it smelled pretty bad, I've smelled SCA people's houses as rank. (Of course, not even Bob's experience of trashed apartments compares with a colleague of his who found a person who had *exploded* all over the bedroom. It was apparently rather hot, and the person died, and biology took over, with ceiling-splashing results.) It is a *very* nice china cabinet. I can get out any smell by putting a bowl of hot water and vinegar inside the cabinet and/or a liberal application of Odor-Eaters. But the smell... It haunts me.
Dorsal - Ventral
Funnier than me: James Lileks disclaimer!
all words copyright Laura Mellin 2000-2005
Diarist.net!
Designed by Gen
|