Last year, at the age of 37, I finally became a homeowner.

Between 2003 and 2019, I lived in 12 different rental units. My reasons for moving so frequently varied; I separated from my first husband twice (ultimately divorcing him in 2014), I had a brother move in and then later leave, I remarried, etc. On one occasion, a windstorm even destroyed the roof of our building, constructively evicting us that same day.

Sixteen years of apartment renting introduced me to quite a few bad landlords and bad neighbors. Here are my stories.

The Landlady Who Was Still There

Provo, Utah, 2005. We showed up with our moving truck at 9 AM on a Saturday to move in at the agreed-upon time, only to find that the landlady (who had been living in the unit) was not even close to being moved out. “Oh, I was going to call and tell you we weren’t ready yet,” she murmured vaguely. We agreed to come back that evening.

Upon returning that evening, the unit was indeed empty but filthy and reeked of her cat. She had also left a large sofa outside of the unit. When the sofa was still there a month later, the Condo Owner’s Association began to pester us and threaten to fine us if we didn’t have it removed. We repeatedly contacted the landlady about the sofa removal and she finally got it done.

The Laundry Room Quickie

Tacoma, Washington, 2007-2008. Our landlord knocked on our door to ask us if we knew anything about the used condom found down the hallway from our unit, by the laundry room.

Ew. And no.

The Determined Cockroaches

Vernon Hills, Illinois, 2009. We rented a unit at Villas By the Lake from landlords whom I’ll call Ruby and Rhett of Des Plaines, marketed by Pace Realty. Upon entering the apartment for the first time, I found cockroaches in the bathroom. I promptly reported this to Ruby, who confidently replied, “That unit doesn’t have cockroaches, so they must have come in with you.”

I had never in my life even seen a cockroach at this point, let alone had them in our previous unit, and we hadn’t moved in any of our belongings. So apparently Ruby’s story was that the cockroaches had come from our moving truck, made their way up three flights of stairs, and found the bathroom sink before we’d even moved in a single box.

Unsurprisingly, Rhett and Ruby would go on to withhold ~$450 of our security deposit to replace a toilet we didn’t crack and a refrigerator we didn’t dent. (There had been work crews in our apartment after the windstorm incident, unsupervised by us.) We complained to Pace Realty, who did not care about any of these things.

We wound up passing on the cockroaches to our next landlords, who were not pleased and refused to renew with us. It took us over a year of aggressive housekeeping and extermination efforts to rid ourselves of the Rhett-and-Ruby cockroaches.

The Nightmare Landlady

Northbrook, Illinois, 2011-2013. I could write an entire essay on this one. Her offenses included:

  • Repeatedly cashing our check for Internet and then not paying the Comcast bill. Our services were shut off three times over the course of our tenancy due to her Comcast bill being $200-$300 past due.
  • Yelling at my daughter who was trying to play in the yard
  • Screaming at me numerous times, in front of my daughter, and threatening to make me get rid of my cat over minor offenses. On one occasion, she accused me of shoving a lawnmower into her hedge and called me “Mrs. Philistine.” Hey, I prefer Ms. Philistine.
  • The cold water broke in the bathroom sink and she attempted to raise my rent to punish me for asking for the repair (it was never repaired)
  • Sending many harassing texts on the first of the month to remind me that the rent is due (our lease did not stipulate a time on the first that it needed to be in by, and I never paid late even once)
  • Hiking the rent on a one-year lease, which is not legal in Illinois
  • Spending our security deposit money, then making excuses after we moved out to keep the entire deposit, saying she’d had to spend the money on our “Internet” (the Internet that we wrote her a check for every month without fail)

I had learned my lesson from Rhett and Ruby and grown a “bad landlord” backbone by this point. I took her to court and got a settlement (she dodged service at both work and home for months). She wound up selling the house to gentrifiers and leaving the state; the house was demolished and a McMansion built there, so she never spent a dime of the security deposit on repairs.

It’s been seven years and my now-fourteen-year-old daughter still talks about how terrible she was.

The Karma Bus

Northbrook, Illinois, 2013. Two young Trinity Evangelical Divinity School students were in our apartment discussing their apartment-hunting when the phone rang. One of them said, “That was Ruby.” “Not Ruby Lastname?” I inquired. Yes, the cockroach-doling, security-deposit-stealing Villas by the Lake landlady.

I told them my story. They didn’t rent from her.

The Salem Walk Weirdness

Northbrook, Illinois, 2013. We tried to rent a unit from Salem Walk in Northbrook. The office managers, whom I’ll call Dawn and Tami, kept on telling us we would be getting a unit and promising to get back to us by a certain date. That date would come and go, so I would call the next day, only for a very-annoyed Dawn to tell me that she still didn’t have anything for me and promise to call me on another date. At two weeks until our move-in date, I began to wonder if Dawn and Tami expected me to just drive our moving truck up to their office on move-in day and ask to sign a lease. “Unprofessional” and “weird” didn’t even begin to describe it.

I finally canceled the application and was accepted to another apartment in less than 24 hours. Since then, my applications have always been accepted within 24 hours.

I later checked out Salem Walk in the news and decided I had dodged a bullet.

The Laundry Gollum

Palatine, Illinois, 2014. In one of the most bizarre episodes of my life, a neighbor accosted me for beating her to the laundry machines one Sunday morning. This neighbor lived closest to the laundry room and was always acting like they were her personal machines, her preeeeccccious. That morning, upon finding me there, she stood blocking the doorway with her considerable girth and kept reaching over to flip off the light-switch while I was in the room. She began taunting me, calling me names, and saying things like, “Get a nose job, you ugly bitch.”

After she repeatedly refused to move out of the way and let me leave, I forced my way past her and went upstairs, then called the Palatine police (who came, talked to her, and did nothing). I was pretty much not surprised when I found that someone had thrown a candy bar into my drying sheets an hour later, and it had melted (but they were black sheets, so I just rewashed them; a clever vandal she was not).

This time I took pictures of her stunt and reported her to management (this was at Arrowhead Apartments). They must have done their jobs and put the fear of God in her, because she never bothered me again.

I took her advice and got a nose job a few years later (and I love it!). But surgery can’t fix what’s wrong with that one.

The Slashed Tire

Palatine, Illinois, 2016. We were living at Village Park of Palatine (then owned by Village Green) and my brother was paying extra to rent a carport. These carports had signs posted that said violators would be towed, but Village Green absolutely refused to enforce this. If you reported a car parked in your spot, the “community aid” would come and place a warning sticker on the car informing them they had 24 hours to move or they would be towed. Of course, no one was ever there longer than one night, so you could always park in someone’s spot for the night consequence-free.

Frustrated with management’s inaction, my brother attempted to politely talk to someone who was parked in his spot. The guy said he didn’t live there and hadn’t known where to park; my brother replied that there was plenty of parking on the street. This angered the guy for some reason and he cussed my brother out and flipped him off, then got in his car and drove off.

The next day, my brother found that his tire had been slashed. When we reported this to Village Green to ask if they had any cameras to capture cars entering and exiting, they didn’t even reply.

Dog Piss on My Head and Tell Me It’s Raining

Des Plaines, Illinois, 2018. I was talking to my husband in the kitchen when liquid began dripping down through a doorjamb. I panicked and contacted the property manager, who was generally slow to address any problem I reported. He said he wasn’t on-site and asked me to talk to the upstairs neighbors myself. These neighbors (a man in his 20s/30s and his mother) were always screaming loudly at each other, so I didn’t relish this task, but I went.

The mother was home and when she opened the door, I immediately spotted a large puddle of dog pee on the crack between her kitchen/living room, in the exact spot where “water” was dripping into my apartment. She was not even attempting to clean it up. I began frantically explaining to her that her dog’s pee was leaking into my apartment.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, it’s just a little dog pee. There must be another water problem in the building.”

A leak kept recurring in our bathroom from the ceiling, and there was water damage in the ceiling of my son’s room. I suspect these were caused by her dog’s pee as well. My friends speculated that the dog usually pees in-doors, which would explain why she wasn’t even trying to clean it up.

A Roachy Revenge

Des Plaines, Illinois, 2018 – 2019. My husband and I leased a three-bedroom apartment on River Rd in Des Plaines. It was the aforementioned apartment with the dog pee and loud, arguing upstairs neighbors, though we didn’t know that at the time. We were the first ones to view the downtown apartment and thought we were pouncing on a steal.

The catch? The building had a longstanding cockroach infestation (confirmed by neighbors). Which, of course, was not disclosed to us before we moved in.

To make a long story short, minimal action was taken in spite of numerous requests and reports to the landlord. I also attempted to report the problem to the City of Des Plaines, but nothing was done. By the end of our tenancy, we were seeing 2-4 cockroaches in the apartment per day, in spite of spending hundreds of dollars of our own money on gels, cedar moth balls, boric acid, and caulk.

The last month of our stay, our landlord of course wanted to show the apartment to new prospective tenants. So I was nice enough to “stage” the apartment for them. I made sure the apartment was spotless, except for the dead cockroaches that I sprinkled all over the bathroom and kitchen counters.

Later that week, the landlord suddenly wanted to treat the apartment for cockroaches.

To my knowledge, the apartment was vacant for some time after we moved out.

The Comedy of Errors

Mount Prospect, Illinois, 2016. I’ve saved this one for last because it is neither neighbor nor landlord-related, but it is apartment-rental related. We had moved into a small third story unit with doors that automatically locked. I wasn’t used to this, so I headed downstairs in my bare feet with no phone and no keys to get the mail, my autistic 2-year-old trailing excitedly after me. It was only when I got back upstairs that I realized I had locked myself out.

I pounded and pounded on my door, but my then-10-year-old daughter (who is also disabled) could not hear me pounding. I knew it was a hot day and her window was open, so I went outside and began calling up to her through her open window, telling her I was locked out. She yelled back to me that she heard me.

I ran back up the three flights of stairs to find my daughter standing in the hallway outside our apartment . . . in her underwear. The automatically-locking door had closed behind her. Now all three of us were locked out, and she was in her underwear, and I didn’t know a single neighbor.

Thankfully, the woman in the apartment beneath us was a saint. She gave us shelter for 30 minutes (and gave my daughter a pair of pants) while we called management to let us back in.

My rental horror stories have now come to an end. I’m sure I’ll have some homeowner horror stories to share in a few years, and who knows. Maybe some day I’ll even have some “bad tenant” horror stories of my own.