Last week I came home to find my front door pasted with official looking documents. I figured that my apartment had been confiscated and it was going to take up days of my time fighting an uncaring bureacracy for the remains of my furniture. It turned out to be much worse than I feared. We were served notice that a bunch of loud jack booted construction workers were going to descend upon our peace and quiet in order to replace the siding and the windows in our rented townhouse. They commandeered all the available parking spaces for a month, turned off our water for no discernible reason, banged on our walls and just popped in through the windows at irregular intervals. Neither my partner nor I do very well with people in general, and these are people we didn’t invite coming in through the windows like commandos sporting caulking guns. It is pretty terrifying. Unfortunately, my partner deals with his anxiety by yelling at me about what the workers are doing, which makes me even more anxious. I spent most of yesterday in a puddle under the bed with the cat.
Renter’s rights are sorely lacking in Oregon. The notice stated that they would access our townhouse between the reasonable hours of April 28 at 8:00am through May 10th at 5:00 pm. That is two weeks of all hours access that apparently gives them the right to invade us. It also read that neither the apartment complex nor the construction company was going to be responsible for any damage done to our property. I didn’t know that you could do that! I’m going to cancel my renter’s insurance and car insurance and just send letters out saying that I will not be responsible for any damage I do. Then I’m going to pop over to my landlord’s house, come in through the window and try to make conversation with them while they are still in they’re pajamas. This is apparently acceptable behavior nowadays! Yay! Since the contractor declined taking any responsibility for any damages, it seemed like the workers were told to inflict as much damage as possible on us. They took this as free license to grind all the hundred dollars worth of flowers we planted into sad little plant paste that will never bloom again.
I wait impatiently for the remodel to be over. I could hope that this will have a happy ending and that the new windows and siding will change my life for the better. I think the more likely scenario is that my rent will be going up. My partner and I have been talking seriously about buying some land in the desert with no utilities, because it’s all we can afford. Then we will build a house out of trash we collect. We’ll call it an earthship and it will be fabulous!