Well the old apartment is all clean, keys left in the cabinet, and I never have to go back there again. Well physically anyway. Now comes the hard part. The calls from my former landlord that the yard isn't good enough, the basement isn't good enough, that I'm not being fair and that she's done SOOO much for me and I can't even return the favor. Let's think about this for a minute... Which favor do I return. The rent free for a month so I could get the place habitable enough (it was disgusting, srsly) for me to be comfortable moving my children in there without worrying about them walking through dog and cat piss, finding things in holes in the walls, actually having a floor you can lay on instead of only walk on with shoes? Or shall i return the favor of her letting me dig through the junk pile in her yard to find something suitable for a grooming tub (which she now says I can "buy" from her) so that I could continue to work and support my children? Or should I return the favor she did by forcing me to teach my children about how to deal with a raging alcoholic? Maybe I should pass out in her yard a few times like she did in mine (Mommy I can't wake her up and I'm scared! LOVED getting that phone call at work). Or the time she wanted to go to the haunted house and needed a driver so she could pour her whiskey into a medication bottle and drink all the way there and back after getting us kicked out 1/3 of the way through the damn thing. Then there was the junk she pushed on me and yes I know I could have told her no, but I found over the years that it was easier to just take the crap (birdbath that didn't hold water, concrete pedestal that was broken in two, entertainment center that didn't even fit a 19in TV, 40 yr old bedroom set that had half the laminate peeling off) then listen to "someone will like it even if it's not good enough for you". And let us not forget the absolutely grand gesture of hers to pay my friends daughter for doing yard work for her with marijuana
Let's be honest. She did do a few things that I should be grateful for, like keeping my rent low at first so I could afford an apartment big enough that my girls didn't have to share a room. Letting me pay my security deposit in increments. Not kicking me out when I got behind on rent so I could have presents for my girls at Christmas. Paying half the plumbing bill to get the shop set up, even though she wouldn't let me do the plumbing myself which would have eliminated the need for a plumber. She even let me borrow her truck once when mine was broken. But how grateful do I have to be? I am the one that increased the rent to a reasonable one. I am the one that paid for every speck of paint, carpet, light fixtures and maintenance on the apartment for 4 years. I'm the one that paid the electric on the dehumidifier because she couldn't be bothered to actually fix the basement so that there wasn't a river running through it for half the year, with the accompanying mold issues. I'm the one that dealt with crap electric that still had fuses and cloth insulation on the wiring. I'm the one that fixed the outlets because literally half of them didn't work. I'm the one that put in flower beds and gardens and an actual fence that separated the yards so that both the upstairs apartment and the downstairs apartment could have dogs, thereby increasing her rent for the upstairs unit AND increasing the property value. I'm the one that placated half her tenants when she went to jail for drunk driving for 90 days and things weren't fixed.
I'd say that we're even...
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