The 2-Year Apartment Rule(tadaima.bearblog.dev) |
The 2-Year Apartment Rule(tadaima.bearblog.dev) |
Except for the leak all of these issues are mainly caused by the tenant. Mold growing in the bathroom is because they're not airing it properly and don't clean it. Roaches and other insect infestations mostly appear because of mishandled food waste and not cleaning the kitchen and floor sufficiently.
"The Heart of a Dog". M.Bulgakov.
Add to that the cheap build quality of these new condo high-rises and you have the 2-year building.
The first few months, you're so impressed how smart everyone is, how competent, what a great organisation it is. By 18 months in, you've decided everyone is an idiot, the organisation is utterly hopeless, and at 2 years you quit.
Never experienced anything like this with apartments though - lived in my last one for 9 years and loved it.
When you are looking for a new apartment you are always trying to find the best place that fits your budget, so you will always find it near the peak of the cycle and see it going downhill in front of your eyes.
Just a theory.
The vent stops working in the bathroom, as the author states? Get maintenance to fix it ASAP.
Roaches in the kitchen? Exterminator.
Leak in the living room? Maintenance. More than once? Get a lawyer ready.
When I started reading the article, I thought the whole point was gonna be that the author doesn't take care of the apartment.
The recurring leak might not be the author's fault, but the mold in the bathroom and roaches in the kitchen definitely are. Is this a case of a total lack of self-reflection? Or a post to scare people away from becoming landlords?
I used to live in a nice apartment in downtown Baltimore. It was a first-story rowhouse in Charles Village (a nice area, back in the 1980s).
It had roaches. Every building, for miles around, had them.
I used to put out lines of borax, and the little bastards took out straws, and snorted them.
I guess maybe new buildings, get a grace period, but roaches are impressive little beasties.
Yes, you can avoid mould in older buildings by carefully airing out rooms and keeping things dry and away from walls. But not if the previous three tenants had a mould issue and the landlord just painted over it.
An honourable mention to fitting Cavity Wall Insulation, heavily sold and encouraged by UK government energy saving schemes thorough the 1990's and 2000's.
Except by stuffing the wall cavity, you provide a nice moisture bridge to outside whilst simultaneously stopping air circulating in the cavity and whipping away moisture; thus an explosion of mould.
The policy was a disaster, as getting the stuff removed costs a small fortune.
Probably would have a better experience if they hired a cleaner.
We built a house and after 2 years it started to need more maintenance, it is normal. I fixed it and every now and then I need to do more. Just regular adult life.
I can tell you from firsthand experience that roaches will move with you. My partner's old apartment had roaches and even though we took great care to clean and separate everything, keep all of her kitchen stuff in tubs and slowly sort through it they still managed to come to the new apartment.
The author lacks self-reflection if they truely thing each brand new place suddenly gets roaches.
Nah, not true. I lived in a student housing that was positively _infested_ with cockroaches (and had stuff like wood paneling on the walls, just to get an idea - i.e. lots of places for roaches to hide). We managed to largely get rid of cockroaches in our room (you still get the occasional one, because well, you had to open the door, and hallways were infested as I mentioned).
It's not _that_ hard, there are a lot of solutions. You need to do 3 things:
a. seal all holes/cracks/niches (e.g. with silicone). cover ventilation holes with nets. Install sponge/rubber bands to make sure doors/windows close well.
b. kill them once when you move in (after doing the work at point a) using copious amounts of insecticides; then install roach traps (sticky ones are good) to catch the occasional one that makes it through your defenses. Keep occasional spraying in the corners/ behind the fridge/ near the pipes/ in places where they are likely to gather.
c. Keep it clean/ don't offer a lot of incentives for roaches to come over to you (no breadcrumbs all over the place, food in closed containers etc)
Do these well and you should be largely roach-free, regardless of the building. But yeah, it's an annoying fight if the building itself is infested.
roaches need to come from somewhere. Even if your apartment is spotless, someone else in the building might not be...
The worst, and again very common, is when the paint is so cheap it can't be cleaned easily - when you use anything that can actually clean the mold (soapy water + a bit of vinegar is my preference, but baking soda, very weak bleach solution, or commercial mold cleaners) it also destroys the paint.
I've got a lot of exposure to new home construction here and can tell you I don't even know what "damp proofing" is, and our bathrooms don't need special paint. They're ventilated and we have HVAC. Beyond that, if homeowners take 30 minute showers with scalding hot water and the door closed then, well, the outcome is inevitable no matter what you do. Not just mold but you'll start damaging fixtures, etc.
It's hard to get old caulking clean and keep it mold free, just gotta recaulk regularly, but I'm somewhat skeptical of blaming paint.
Do you keep it warm? These things were often built with a fireplace inside.
Condensation itself is a function of the air conditions (temperature and relative humidity ie dew point) and surface temperatures. All surfaces should be comfortably above the dew point to prevent mold. You can use a hygrometer to measure the air, and an infrared thermometer to measure surface temperatures.
I think a lot of people are worried about informing the landlord (especially after two years) as market rates will have risen, and getting stuff fixed might prompt a rise on their own apartment.
They also imply that is always happen.
> I've noticed this myself with every apartment I've ever lived in.
Same for the cockroaches. You can be victim of a neighbor’s lack of care. But if it happens in every flat, maybe you're the problem.
I'm all-in for blaming landlord's of taking money from renters and not putting any money back on helping keeping the flat in a livable state. But some of the issue the author is pointing out, and the fact that they happen in every flat, make me think that maybe part of the blame is on them.
We bought two after moving to Ireland. Both have drainage hoses. One has a pump and empties into the kitchen sink, the other has no pump and the drainage hose empties into the shower. No more mold problems.
The thing is when you move into a place, the apartment has gone through thorough maintenance and cleaning, and of-course you don't pick the apartment with the obvious water stains and mold, or the sketchy neighbors and rundown hallway. But as the time passes, fixtures fail, damage accumulates neighbors rotate.
You apartment is the best when you move in because it's made to look its best and you pick the best looking one.
When you own a place you can do the extensive maintenance yourself.
My wife or I clean all bathrooms with strong cleaner, every week. I suppose, the author did not. And it isn't landlord's job to clean rooms.
The roaches too if they are in your kitchen call a exterminator. Don't leave food out at night, clean all crumbs.
If you don't take care of those things even in a a new building they will appear on their own after 2 years.
It should be mentioned that this was a rental out in rural nowhere, so no dramatic price hikes. The house was also paid off years before it became a rental.
Our family did janitorial services, which usually came to fixing some smaller things once or twice a year. Nothing extreme.
For us, it was smooth sailing. I really think the key was rent stability.
From previous personal experience as a renter in a high cost of living area, though, it seemed like landlords were extremely focused on raising rent. If they felt that they couldn't raise rent enough (where I live there are regulations), they'd try every trick in the book to cancel your tenancy contract/agreement, because then they could set a new rent for the next one.
Some such units were more or less revolving doors with new tenants every 1-2-3 years.
Only as a student did I see slummy apartments rented out by actual slumlords. Those were professional landlords that owned tens to hundreds of rentals, aimed at students, and seemed to follow a strict maximize rent/minimize upkeep philosophy.
I have lived in many apartments that were decades old and well taken care of. None of the problems mentioned in the blog occurred. I don't see how even an slight exaggeration of this theory could remotely be true. Although I am sure specific cases can be found where it is true, but not universally.
And a plus is that when it breaks down the only fumes it gives off is pure oxygen, unlike other cleaners like bleach. It did such a good job that I use peroxide as a general purpose cleaner now.
I will add one note that you should rinse your hands regularly if cleaning with peroxide. Just a few days ago I had a leaky spray nozzle, and the peroxide was on my finger long enough that it was able to soak in. It turned my skin chalk-white and caused an uncomfortable bubbling sensation inside my skin. I had no idea it was even a reaction that could happen. It only lasted for a few hours, but it's not something I would want to happen again.
Seeing mold in joints is not unusual depending on the conditions, but it's also easily fixable.
For cockroaches either there is none in your area, either get one in a year "by mistake", but if it's a recurring events the problem is likely food or garbage that sits longer than it should.
Frankly, I wouldn't want to ride the elevator with the author either.
By the default nature of the bathroom being a humid environment (relative to the rest of any house), my wife and I squeegee our shower after each use, and attack the tile weekly in order to keep it free of mildew.
It’s easier for both the current tenants and landlords to defer maintenance by respectively, moving to a new building that matches your expectations and renting your unit to someone whose expectations matches the current state of the unit.
Both approaches don’t require addressing the previous maintenance “debt”. That’s why it feels like it’s all downhill after the first 2 years — either inside your unit, or in the building’s common spaces, or both.
I do end up changing apartments after the two year lease period because I get bored of the area or the landlord raises the rent.
It is sometimes possible to learn about these problems by carefully reviewing reviews and remarks from current and past tenants.
As a retrofit without those things I guess I can see it being problematic.
As far as communities are concerned, the best places to live are the places where landlords/management and residents/tenants both do their parts to keep things clean and habitable. Teamwork makes the dream work.
I agree that a dehumidifier helps but you basically need one in every room. Where I live you can easily take out 10 liters a day from every room during the humid season (which is the maximum capacity of the machine I rented).
Even though the house is really old, it has been taken care of. There is no mold, the doors are still the same original ones, the fireplaces with decorative tiles are still there, and the wooden fireplace parts are still in good condition. I don't know how they did it, but it was built rather well.
Interesting tidbit: on the ceiling there was something like a Star of David. After asking LLMs what it was, one of them said that when Australia became a country, the Federation Star had only six points, denoting the newly incorporated states, but later a seventh point was added. Gemini told me that the frieze details were typical for the 1901-1910 period, and this helped me date the house.
This took about 10 minutes. Before, it would probably have taken me at least several hours of Googling.
Apart from a brief spell when I was very young and my family lived in a 1950s council house I've never lived in a building as new as that... and I'm 60 and have lived in 11 different properties. But that's the UK and Edinburgh for you...
Edit: Never had any mould problems but then again most of the places I lived had draughty sash windows...
1. we kept it very clean 2. the owners/landlords lived in the building with their children
Thank you "Monika landlord"! (that's how she signed the Christmas cards she would give us - yes, I know how lucky we got)
In the many years I lived there... the place was pretty much identical. Sure, it'd probably need a deep clean for the (faux?) wooden floor that gets dirt into the crevices... but that's it?
Even back home in India, we've lived in buildings made around the 1990s iirc. They're perfectly fine, and apart from outdated floor plans, there's nothing problematic about their age at all.
Though, I just remembered one thing. In India, everything is made of concrete, and even in NL, beyond the outer concrete walls, the inner walls - even though often drywall-like - are very "high quality". They're extremely soundproof and fireproof (the latter of which I unfortunately learnt post a fellow neighbour's fire. Their room was burnt down to the bedframe, the neighbours were just fine. Never leave your cooking unattended, folks!)
So we spray more often.
It costs me $83 per three months. I haven't seen a roach in sixteen years.
Ours has been on constantly for nearly a year. Any decent one has humidity set points - we set ours for 55%. It's a bang-bang controller with a 5% range - it'll run until humidity drops to 52%, then turn off until it rises to 57%. During the winter our single one struggles to get much below 60%, we might add a second next year.
An unexpected benefit (for us, as its not something we're used to) is its virtually "free", as we don't have to run the electric clothes dryer anymore (nearly €4/load). We just hang the clothes on a rack by the dehumidifier and it dries them out in a few hours. My wife is starting to prefer it as its not destroying clothes nearly as quickly.
It’s not free as the dehumidifier has to do more work. If you have a modern heat-pump clothes dryer you might be using more electricity by abusing your humidifier like this.
Like, central ventilation is not magical unobtainable technology. Simple heat recovery even vastly improves heating costs in a way insulation never can.
What of the buildings that don’t comply in time? Or can’t find trades to do it in time? Or we notice to our eternal shock that projects to ensure code tracking are priced at a serious premium?
Or, how many improvements to code would we decide weren’t desirable because of the costs of retrofitting, so now we lose even the low slope of improvement versus today.
Not to mention, a lot of places around the world care about the look and character of historical locations. If a structure wasn't designed for central HVAC, for example, then there's often nowhere to hide the condenser units, air handle units or the ductwork. Same with insulation -- if that exterior wall wasn't intended to have it you've got a couple options and they both hurt.
Last of all, I'll mention labor. The type of skilled labor that can do any specific trade at all is relatively rare in the aftermath of the "college-or-bust" era, but the kind of labor you'd want for renovation work (fast, efficient, can tackle multiple different aspects at once without calling in different trades, and gets it right the first time to minimize disruption/call backs) is even more rare. To carry out some kind of massive renovation project at a national level even with infinite money you're talking about a generational timeframe just due to labor constraints.