Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Today has royally sucked. I can't remember a single day recently when I have felt so angry. I will tell you why...

On Friday we placed a maintenance order for our A/C unit in the boys' bedroom because we FINALLY figured out that the crazy black dust was coming from the actual unit, not the vents. We then left town. We assumed that the A/C unit would be cleaned and all would be good. This was not the case.

It appears that the first problem is that our maintenance request was never received. Why the complex would have the online maintenance request form sent to a defunct email address is beyond me, but I digress. So, nobody entered our apartment over the weekend and they didn't fix the black dust problem. Little did we know, this would not be the real issue. Secondly, the leak that could have tipped us off WAS reported to our maintenance manager months ago and he said that they knew about the problem and were working on it. I should have made a bigger deal about it when the water damage slowly got worse, but hindsight is 20/20. And thirdly, I should have filed an EMERGENCY maintenance request last night - rather than leave a message for the management to get in the morning - when we got home and the carpet was soaked through and inspected the entire apartment. I really didn't look carefully because it was dark and I wanted to get our sleeping babies into bed. If I'd looked better, maybe I would have realized the serious problem we were having.

When we woke up this morning, the entire apartment smelled like urine and the flooding was worse. I immediately called the emergency maintenance line and they sent the maintenance manager right over to look at our problem. The floor in the boys' bathroom was covered in yellow fluid, their bedroom's carpet and the dining room's carpet completely soaked through, and the water damage on the baseboard in the hallway I'd reported months ago was seriously worse. We quickly left the apartment for the day, fearing that it was a sewage leak. What a shock, it was.

Our complex manager tried to jerk us around all day, first telling us that the complex would not reimburse us for a hotel while they fix the damage, then saying they didn't plan to replace the carpet at all. Finally, after realizing she was breaking the law and basically telling us to live in a literal cesspool she offered us to stay in the model apartment for a few days. Never mind that it has minimal furniture, no linens, no baby proofing, and is on the third floor. We were happy to take her up on her meager offer since our options were low, but quickly realized that we wouldn't be able to stay there without some work. Right now, the babies are sleeping in the living room and Travis and I are holed up in our bedroom with every window in our apartment open until we can figure out a new plan.

You may be asking, "Why aren't you in a hotel?" Great question! After our complex manager oh-so-nicely suggested we call our renter's insurance company to file a claim and get them to pay for the damaged furniture and our hotel, we did just that. Things seemed to be finally going okay. We were set up in an extended stay hotel suite and told that our policy covered everything. Less than an hour after feeling a little less stressed about our sleeping situation, we got the devastating call. Turns out that "sewage seepage" is excluded from our policy. It is a separate contract in Texas - not in other states, apparently - that we were not told about by our agent. So, NONE OF THE DAMAGE IS COVERED IN OUR PLAN. No hotel. No kitchen table and chairs. Nothing. If we want to stay in a hotel it is out of our pocket and our budget is simply too tight to swing it.

We are planning to move out. We spent our day apartment hunting because the whole situation is so insane. At the end of the day, I spoke with one of the leasing agents at our current complex - don't get me wrong, we hate the manager, but the actual staff of the complex is very accommodating and nice - about getting out of our lease. He was unable to give me an answer about whether or not we could break our lease without the financial repercussions since he doesn't have the authority. But, he did tell me that the actual cost of breaking our lease right now would not cost the $1000 we expected but a whopping $3000! Apparently, it is the policy of our complex to charge the remaining rent on your lease (two months worth for us since we're ten months in) and all of the rent discounts you've received on the apartment. Because we signed our lease during a big sale, they want us to pay the $200 per month we've lived here that they didn't get from leasing it at market price. THEY ARE CRAZY!!! We have a meeting in the morning with the complex manager to try to get out of the lease but she's been a total [expletive] up to this point that I can't imagine her doing anything to help us now.

So yeah, today's sucked. I hope you had a better Monday than we did.