ADVENTURES IN HARLEM: Free Installation of Skylights Via Ceiling Leak

ADVENTURES IN HARLEM


Sometimes I think NYC living exists just to humble people.... AKA me. Growing up we weren't rich but my parents always made sure we had a roof over our heads and it was nice. It was homey. It was clean. It wasn't just a house it was home. And minus the kitchen that looked like a garden puked flower wall paper all over not just the walls but the ceiling it wasn't a place I would be ashamed to have people come visit. Then I got to have my own place! I got to decorate however I wanted. I carried over this same mentality. I wanted to walk into my home, sit on the couch, light a candle, relax and read a book. I never had to worry about cleaning because my place was just clean. If I wanted to do laundry I could open a door and there were my beautiful front loading washer and dryer. If I wanted to cook I had a beautiful kitchen with granite counter tops, stainless steel appliances, a dishwasher, every cooking utensil ever needed and all matching dish sets, Riedel wine glasses, the list goes on. My bathroom towels all matched. My bathroom was huge! And clean. Brand new. A bath tub that I would spend hours in, bring in the laptop and watch a movie. It was quiet. It was perfect. It was mine. And then I moved to NYC.

My first adventure was living in a living room out in the middle of NO WHERE, Queens. I had a queen sized blow up mattress (which I miss more than anything now) and I spent way too much money on a 7 ft screen room divider so that I could have pretend privacy. Then after months of searching I made the big move to Manhattan! The things a person will sacrifice to live in the city and have a decent stranger for a roommate are astonishing. For instance, I'm convinced that my bedroom was once a closet. My room is definitely smaller than my walk in closet growing up. We joke that I don't have a floor because, well, I don't have a floor. I have a full size bed, a closet that is MAYBE 2 ft long and thats being generous. its not even deep enough to put hangers in properly so they're jammed in there at an angle. I have a small dresser and a little bookcase that I've turned into another small dresser with baskets. It's usually 10000 degrees because its so small there is no way to have a cross breeze. Almost everything I have to my name lives in this room. My building is also like 400 years old which means that something is breaking constantly. For example, we have not had a working stove/oven since I moved in. It has taken the "workers" ( workers in quotes because they are obviously not working) 4 months to rewire our apartment because our building is no longer allowed to be a gas building because it's not up to code. Shocker. I'm pretty sure they worked about 5 and a half days out of that 4 month period. Last week we were told we would get our stove. Finally, today, on my way to work there were about twenty stoves sitting outside the building with no workers to be found. So maybe they will move it into the hallway and by next week it'll be installed.

Last week when I returned from Montreal we discovered that there had been a leak from two apartments up for 5 days that went unnoticed. We basically came back to no walls in our bathroom because if you touched the wall or ceiling it would literally crumble at the softest touch. AND THE MOLD!!!!! Oh my gosh the mold is still so out of control. So not only are our walls collapsing we now have an infestation of flies that have somehow found a way in through the non existent walls. Oh yes, lets also not forget the critters. Rodents, like mice, can now vacation in our lovely apartment because all they have to do is knock and the walls let them right in! And thanks to our walls I had a friendly visiter make a mad dash from the kitchen into my bedroom the other night. In which I screamed like a wild banchy and threw a mouse trap under my bed. Finally, after many angry conversations we got our lazy ass super to come assess the damage. That only took a week of threats of calling the state and reporting them and charging them for the lavish suite at the W hotel I was about to book (you think I'm kidding...). So now our bathroom sits in shambles. They've replaced the ceiling and two of the walls so far. We still can't shower and we had to fight them for 4 hours last night to come fix our toilet so that it would work again for the night. WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND THINKS ITS OK TO FINISH WORK AND NOT TURN THE FLIPPING TOILET BACK ON????? Seriously, 8PM we finally had a working toilet. I ended up spending the entire day at Starbucks working because they kept shutting off my power, I had no bathroom, and frankly, I was sick of smelling them and being called mami or lil baby. I'm not your baby, or your girl, or your mami. Get some manners and show some respect ass holes!

So as I said earlier, NYC makes you appreciate everything you have ever had because to live here and not spend $3000 a month for a one bedroom in a decent area, which many of my friends actually pay, you sacrifice everything. You learn how to kill bugs of unusual sizes and rodents, use a laundry mat and pray it doesn't ruin your clothes, live in closets and survive off of a two burner plug in to cook your food. And don't bother spending a lot of money to have nice things because you'll probably end up getting robbed. Seriously, I couldn't find anyone at first that would give me renters insurance and now I know why... because you may just come home to find that your walls are missing and you have a free remodel job with a sky light in your bathroom.