The death trap I now live in...

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When I went looking for an apartment here in Cheyenne, I started a week before I moved, thinking no one would be willing to set something up over the phone any earlier. Well anyways, I was somewhat right on this as most of the places I called had a ton of paper work to go through and it would have been better for me to stop in person to deal with all of it.

But I was able to find the place I have now, and being the information vegetable I am, I now want out of this place ASAP.

I've done some snooping around the last place and here at the things I found...

- The carpet in the place was never vacuumed and was crawling with crap. I bought a vac and cleaned it as best as possible.
- The door to the place was kicked open at one point and the framing and the door was patched up using sheet metal
- The bathroom must have been an abandoned project - The floor is cement, but something must have been planned as half of it is covered with some kind of primer.

- The electrical system is substandard, and IMO a major fire hazard. I don't know where the breaker panels are and the wiring is a mix of 14 gauge old and new style romex, BX (which is known to be a fire hazard, and ancient K & T.
- In the basement (where my apartment is), there is one light fixture hanging down by the wires itself
- I pulled out my multimeter and found that the neutral in the house is bad/floating - there is a 55 volt potential between neutral and earth ground when there should be zero, and sometimes it will be fine.
- None of the outlets are of the three prong type which means no grounding.
- There are two light switches that don't work.

but the thing that scares me the most...

- The house has an old GE forced air furnace that must be at least 50 years old. My landlord said that it didn't work and he didn't use it, but when I put my ear next to it, I can hear gas hissing out of the burner jets which are wide open, which then vents out of the chimney. Any type of electrical discharge near the house (i.e. lightning) and theres a big potential for a large BOOM!! even worse, if there some kind of blockage to the chimney, the gas will back up into my apartment.

You'd think my landlord would be receptive to all this, but for the past few days he's been in a drunken stupor and won't answer the door. He has yet to deliver some kind of lease for me to sign and I'm not gonna pay him a penny until we sign something.

So... I think I'll deal with all the paper work and move someplace else ASAP before this place kills me.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to live within a mile of there. YIKES!

BTW that is NOT up to code. The whole place could be condemned.

As for the gas leaking? My furnace is a cheap one, and old fashoined. The inspector basically rationalized it by saying it is simple with fewer parts. How does IT work?

1. Start blower.
2. Check for positive pressure.
3. IF positive pressure, start gas, otherwise turn off blower and wait a few minutes and go back to #1.
4. Ignite gas.
5. IF gas can't be ignited, turn off gas, turn off blower, wait a few minutes, and go to #1!

In fact, I KNOW it works that way, especially since the last 2 failures I had were due to #2 failing. The hose to the sensor was plugged. So it never started the furnace.

didnt you used to live in wisconsin - So youve gone from death trip to death trap!

Is there some sort of government dept. that enforces compliance to health & safety legislation?

Must be a really cheap place then, do you have the knowledge to fix up some of the problems yourself?

it sounds like you are renting someones basement? if you didnt sign any kindof lease i'd move outta there

Er...I would move out. There's no point risking lives over it.

Did you sign a lease for it? If you did, you may have issues getting any cash that you gave the landlord returned to you if you decide to breal the lease prematurely, but then again, that may be worth it.

One of the first things that I would do with the new job is put cash away for a deposit+first and last month's rent on a new apartment. Look around for a ground floor apartment in a quiet, up to date complex. -- A lot of the management companies are quite competitive, and you may be able to get a good deal on a decent apartment.

He said he didn't.

That's the plan. There's a HUD place six blocks from my job I'm looking to get into. It's low income housing, but they try to shed that low income housing stigma by making all their tenants sign a drug, alchohol, conduct & weapons pledge. (I talked to them on the phone before I moved) there full up now, but I'll try to get on some kind of waiting list.

There's another low income place in town also, but they want your life story and there IMO too expensive for me.

Oh geez! lol, his last name isn't Hadley by any chance is it? One of my old landlords was very similar-needed a place in an emergency and wound up finding a whole bunch of things I would have rather not have had to learn about through actually living there. My place actually caught on fire (we got the fire put out) due to the way he had the furnace plugged in and the bad wiring, and we later found out the place HAD been condemned several times with him barely getting the places back up to par and renting them out again-heck, I'm not even sure if he ever did get them up to par, lol. He was friends with the small town judge, as well as fire department, etc., so any time we complained, we got shooed away or people would just say "yeah I know". Turns out it had also flooded a few years before we moved in, and the wood holding it up (it was a trailer) were all rotting away, he never bothered to put anything diff under it.

Sorry to hear about all of the stuff you are now finding out about your place I wish you much luck finding a new one!

Move out ASAP and file complaints at the state level. They cost too much for most small-timers to bribe.

On the other hand, the last apartment that I rented in an apartment complex suffered from plumbing issues with the apartment above, and I wound up being driven from my apartment due to the of sewerage from the apartment above me forming a lake in tthe middle of my living room floor.

That actually happened in my grandmas apartment. The plumbing in the unit above here went bad, but the builders ran the plumbing into and down the hallways so thats where the flood was.

I pity people who live in older complexes that have cast iron sewage pipes. Those eventually rust out.

Actually the apartment complex that it happened to me in was maybe 10 or 15 years old at most. -- I work for a company that supplies construction materials to the home construction industry, and I find myself amazed at the shoddy quality of new construction. For example, there are a couple of fairly large builders that do not even use wood sheathing on the outside frame of their houses. They use a 1/8 inch plastic sheathed cardboard not unlike that used to back legal pads, and then hang vinyl siding on top of it, insulate it from the inside, and then cover the inside walls with sheetrock. --The going price for a house built like this runs from $100k to $200k down here.

Yea, the place I live in now was built the old fashion way - With plaster and lathe walls.

Anyway, my landlord paid me a visit. He's been very under the weather the past few days. I don't want to give the impression that I'm knocking the guy, he's a really nice guy, I just don't think that this is the best of places for me to be in.

Sounds a little better than this house 11 years ago.

The "money pit" took alot of work and cleaned up well thankfully.

My advice though....if you didn't buy it and aren't stuck with it...I'd find someplace else ASAP...you may want to invest in a CO2 detector in the meantime...better safe than not waking up in the morning, we almost came pretty close.