Status Update – Why I Rent

There was a time, not so long ago, when people always said to me, “Merry, why are you still renting? You should buy a house.” Well, my answer has always been that I owned a house once, and I really hated raking, mowing, shoveling, weeding, and paying for that tree that fell down in my yard after a storm. I’m good with renting so that someone else can take care of all that, and last night I had a vivid reminder of that!

It looks so harmless now, but last night…

This is actually a short story. I got up at 1:30am to use the potty… Climbed back in bed… Noticed my upstairs neighbors walking around a little… Then all of a sudden, I hear this sound that my half-asleep brain couldn’t identify. At first I thought it was the kitten playing with something. Whenever I hear strange noises in my house, I immediately assume it’s the cats. But no, it was coming from my en suite master bathroom.

So I get up again, go to take a look, and… WATER WAS POURING OUT OF THE LIGHT FIXTURE! Not dripping, mind you, pouring. I threw down my towel and ran to get the bucket from the guest room. And why do I have a bucket in my guest room, you ask? Because a couple of weeks ago when we had a little snow and it started to melt, the ceiling in my guest room started leaking. They figured that one out, fixed the gutter outside, and will come make the guest room ceiling pretty again at some point, so that’s all well and good.

But back to the middle of last night and my master bath. I plunked the bucket under the leak—which was already slowing down at that point—and just stood there and stared at it for a moment. Because really, what could I do? Nothing. So I went back to bed (and took an hour and a half to fall asleep again). This morning I put in a maintenance request online. In it, I mentioned that my washing machine still hasn’t been fixed yet.

Ain’t my problem.

Oh yeah, my washing machine broke about two weeks ago. It doesn’t spin at the end of the load, so the clothes don’t drain and come out of the washer sopping wet. But they’re scheduled to deal with that at some point.

AND THIS IS WHY I RENT. Because none of this is my problem. I don’t have to pay for any of it. I don’t own anything that was damaged. I don’t have to do anything more than call the office to have maintenance come deal with it. I don’t even have to be home when they come. Woo hoo!

I should also just mention that where some people might freak out at all these problems, it doesn’t really bother me too much. This is still an awesome apartment which I love, and I wouldn’t think of moving out, unless maybe the ceilings started caving in. I guess I’m just easy to please.