Apartments and moving
Sep. 24th, 2003 12:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynFor four months, two thirds of my apartment has not had a functioning thermostat, which annoys me greatly. I asked Lut to call the building owner (as opposed to the building manager, who has, after all, been blowing us off for four months) and complain to him. I suppose when that doesn't accomplish anything, I'll send letters to the health department and the Better Business Bureau.
But as inconvenient as the issue with the thermostat is, it's not what's really bugging me about the apartment situation. We use the room with a functioning thermostat most of the time, and for most of the summer, we've been able to get comfortable by opening windows, and having them switch the semi-permanent setting around. It's been off for the last couple of weeks, which has been fine. And I know how to turn it back on, if I do risk electrocution in doing so, and if Lut doesn't want me to because he thinks it might give the building manager an exuse to blame the troubles on us.
Anyway, what's bugging me today is that a couple of weeks ago, the office received a package for us and didn't tell us. Normally they leave a note on our mailbox. This time, Lut only found out because he happened to check the site he'd ordered it from, and they said it had arrived. The office had had it for more than 24 hours without notifying us, before Lut picked it up.
We rarely get packages. But it's been eating at me, this morning, that if the office hangs onto my packages, I have no way of finding out short of marching in there and asking them periodically. I don't know if their failure to notify us was malice or incompetence. I don't know if they're going to graduate to outright stealing packages; I don't know what would possess them to do so, but, quite frankly, I have zero faith in them. They've been lying to me for months about the thermostat issue. Why should I assume they wouldn't lie about other things?
The logical thing to do is move and escape these creeps. The thing is ... I don't want to move. I hate moving. I hate spending money and I hate everything else that attends moving. And if I'm going to go to all the trouble of moving, I want to move somewhere I can spend the rest of my life, because I don't want to ever have to move again. And I don't know where I want to spend the rest of my life.
Maybe I should buy a motorhome and live in it. Then if I wanted to move, I could just start the engine and drive there.
Sure would be a lot easier than packing and unpacking.
But as inconvenient as the issue with the thermostat is, it's not what's really bugging me about the apartment situation. We use the room with a functioning thermostat most of the time, and for most of the summer, we've been able to get comfortable by opening windows, and having them switch the semi-permanent setting around. It's been off for the last couple of weeks, which has been fine. And I know how to turn it back on, if I do risk electrocution in doing so, and if Lut doesn't want me to because he thinks it might give the building manager an exuse to blame the troubles on us.
Anyway, what's bugging me today is that a couple of weeks ago, the office received a package for us and didn't tell us. Normally they leave a note on our mailbox. This time, Lut only found out because he happened to check the site he'd ordered it from, and they said it had arrived. The office had had it for more than 24 hours without notifying us, before Lut picked it up.
We rarely get packages. But it's been eating at me, this morning, that if the office hangs onto my packages, I have no way of finding out short of marching in there and asking them periodically. I don't know if their failure to notify us was malice or incompetence. I don't know if they're going to graduate to outright stealing packages; I don't know what would possess them to do so, but, quite frankly, I have zero faith in them. They've been lying to me for months about the thermostat issue. Why should I assume they wouldn't lie about other things?
The logical thing to do is move and escape these creeps. The thing is ... I don't want to move. I hate moving. I hate spending money and I hate everything else that attends moving. And if I'm going to go to all the trouble of moving, I want to move somewhere I can spend the rest of my life, because I don't want to ever have to move again. And I don't know where I want to spend the rest of my life.
Maybe I should buy a motorhome and live in it. Then if I wanted to move, I could just start the engine and drive there.
Sure would be a lot easier than packing and unpacking.
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Some Perspective
Date: 2003-09-24 12:25 pm (UTC)Where you live has a tremendous effect on how happy you are. It controls what places are within convenient range (by whatever traveling method you prefer) and forces a lot of the decisions of everyday life by greatly influencing what it's convenient for you to do from home.
It's certainly true that moving is a hassle and it's hard to imagine any short run problem that would be important enough to solve by moving. That's not the right perspective, though. The problems that moving solves are almost never short term.
Imagine, for example, that it would take 200 hours of effort for you to move (including the time required to earn any money you spend on the move). This is a massive amount of time and effort which exceeds even what my last move cost me, and I knocked down a load-bearing wall among other optional things -- by comparison, my move from Colorado took only about 60 hours. Let's say that as a result of this move, each of you would be happier by 15 minutes per day (a fairly modest estimate assuming that you like the new place enough to be considering a move). This 15 minutes might be time saved by being closer to some place you have to go anyway or the value that you place on increased comfort and new options that the move gives you. Using these assumptions which aren't very kind to the move, you will break even in about 13 months.
13 months is long enough that I can understand not wanting to move lightly, but it's hardly such an imposingly long time that you need to be happy in the new place forever to be making your life easier by putting in the effort up front. Now, if the problems you have with your current apartment aren't really bad enough to be worth solving, that's a whole different story. If they are that bad, though, just find a place where you're confident that you can be happy for two or three years. Forever can take care of itself in due course.
P.S. I once did a back of envelope calculation of cost of owning a motor home to travel around to short term projects and learned that it would be cheaper to fly first class and stay in 4 star hotels than to own and operate a motor home the size of a hotel room (say, 300 square feet). Needless to say, I abandoned the whole concept. Unless you like very small spaces, a motor home is just not going to cut it.
Re: Some Perspective
Date: 2003-09-24 04:54 pm (UTC)As far as the apartment goes -- I dunno that my problems here are bad enough to be worth solving. Or, moreover, that moving will solve them. Anyone can be a crappy landlord, or sell the building to a crappy landlord (as was the case here.)
I could, however, conceivably get a place closer to my job, which -- using your "time saved daily" analysis -- might be justifiable. But Lut's not keen on living near where I work (I can't blame him; frankly, I don't want to live near where I work, either). Still, we could look around the area and see if there's something somewhat closer than my current place.