Chapter Two: A Week-Long Ordeal - Part II

Part One – Three Days of Debating, Waiting,
and Winning (Sort of)

BE SURE TO CHECK THE BLOG ARCHIVE TO THE RIGHT 

AND START FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY!

It's been close to eight months since I've updated my blog about my move to Florida. With that much time between this post and the previous one, I put a lot of thought in to how to approach things. That lead me to think about why it had been so long since I had updated. There are more than a couple of reasons for that, but two main causes stick out in my mind. 

First, life got busy. My first couple of months here were filled only with looking for a job(s) and being lazy at home writing blogs, watching movies, and basically visiting places I wanted to go. After I got a job and started to get settled into a routine of trying to play music and just getting back to everyday life, I didn't have as much time to write. Don't get me wrong, I could've totally written a post or two here and there, but the second reason for not writing anything else for so long is more to the point. 

The more pertinent reason I passed on writing more: it made me tired. Having gone through the ordeal of battling an apartment complex to let you leave, I was remiss to relive the experience by writing about it. I did get the first part of the story down, and I started on more than one occasion to finish it up, but I never could do it. Every time I started to write about it, I just got angry and frustrated again, which lead to me getting tired from it all again. Now that some time has passed, I feel like I can probably finish the story of our brief time at Lake Jasmine, follow that up with where we landed and how we got there, and then move on to shorter entries about other experiences I've had since moving here. 

There's obviously a lot to catch people up on if anyone is interested in reading it, but I'm not in a huge hurry. There's also a very clear an simple starting point, the end of the story I started in my previous entry. So, without further ado or delay: 

Lake Jasmine - Part II

I

I decided, logically, that Fred wouldn't be at our apartment until 9:00 AM at the earliest. Even if he didn't go to his office first and came straight to the complex, he surely wouldn't start any earlier than that. So, the roommate and I got up and ready, drove the short distance back to the complex, and we sat on the front porch waiting to meet the company's regional manager. We sat on the porch for a while, went inside to check things out again and get a few of our things, sat on the porch a while more, and by 10:30 AM, began to get aggravated. I called the cell number Fred had given me the day before, but I got no answer and left a voice mail. When I still hadn't heard anything by 11:00 AM, I headed for the complex office. 

The leasing agent in the office was just as friendly as always, and she went to ask the property manager if she knew anything about the visit. She came back to tell me that Fred had been called to a meeting last minute and that he planned on being there that afternoon. With nothing else to do but wait, I went back to the apartment for some more porch sitting. We passed the time by playing around on my laptop and tablet and both our phones. Around 1:00 PM, I left and went for something to eat. While I was gone, the roommate had visitors. 

Hello, do you have a minute...

Two young men dressed in dress pants, dress shirts, and ties approached her, asking about random things to make small talk. The weather, where she was from originally, how long we'd lived there, and several other topics came up before the two kids dug in to the real meat of the subject, the Mormon religion. Now, I don't know if you understand the amount of frustration that we had both been feeling, but as you can imagine, this was not a good time for an attempted conversion conversation. My roommate dispatched the two kids with a simple statement, "Yeah, I'm an atheist, but if you want to stay and talk, we can, just not about that probably". Having the direct response was enough to shake their determination, and they moved on to another potential Mormon in waiting. I missed this entire interaction, but I couldn't have pulled back into the parking lot with lunch more than five minutes after they left. It's probably in their best interest that I wasn't there; I was in an even less pleasant mood. 

We ate lunch, sandwiches and chips from a local Wawa. For those of you that don't know, a Wawa is sort of like a Sheetz, but it has less options in the Made-to-Order department. The food is pretty good, though. I'd recommend stopping at one if you ever have the chance. After finishing off lunch, we waited some more until around 4:00 PM. I decided, again, logically, that Fred would be done with work by 5:00 PM, so, an hour before that seemed like a good time to try and contact him again. I called his cell for the second time that day, and he answered.

I

I asked if he was still planning on coming by the apartment, and he apologized, saying that he wasn't going to make it that day. Some things had come up, but he was sure that he would get out there tomorrow, Thursday. He did, however, make us another offer. He gave us the option to move into the complex's model unit. He would have the staff at the complex move everything out and help us move our things over there, and he was going to give it to us for the same rate that we were going to pay for the slightly smaller unit we had originally been given. He also offered to discount the next month's rent $300.00 if we stayed in the apartment we were originally going to take. I told him we'd think about and have an answer when we saw him the next day, but I know the latter of the two was not something we'd do. 

If you ever see one of these, stop there!

I was a little frustrated with him not coming out that day, as promised, but I was even more frustrated that I had to contact him again. After decided that he wasn't going to make it out to the property, he didn't take the time to call and let me know. If he had decided that earlier in the day, the roommate and I could have gone on back to the motel and not sat on the porch all day. He still seemed very sincere in wanting to help us out, though, and he did have some options for us. We stopped by the office on our way out, took a good, detailed look at the model, and then headed back to the motel.

That night, I came up with the only solution we were willing to concede. If he would allow us to move into the model and give us the discounted rate up front toward the next month's rent, we'd take that option, He would basically be giving us the same amount he'd offered to give us over the course of a year, but it would be in one lump some, $480.00. Of course, this was with the understanding that we wanted access to the model overnight to see if we were going to have the same problem. This sounded like a fair agreement to me. We had spent a few hundred dollars staying in the motel for six nights - two of which were my fault to some degree - and needed that money back up front to pay rent, so, basically, the $480.00 would be compensation for our motel stay. I felt pretty good about things, as good as possible anyway, and went to bed thinking I'd speak with him in the morning, and we'd get it all ironed out. I should've had stuck with the "plan for the worst and hope for the best" attitude I usually have.

To save a lot of typing on my part and reading on your part, I'll sum up the next three days pretty quickly. Think of it like a montage from a movie or TV show that shows you all kinds of boring parts that are detrimental to the story in one quick sequence. I made the suggested offer to regional manager the next morning, and I was told he would have to see if that's something he could do for us. He was going to call me back later that day. The day came and went, with me making two more calls to him and hearing nothing back. We stayed in the motel another night, and Friday morning brought things to a head. I went to the property manage'rs office, and basically, she told us the decision had been made for us.

Scumbag Landlord

She gave us all our money orders back that had been used to pay the deposit and first month's rent, which left us only losing the application fees. That was OK, I guess, but we were still out the money we had spent in motel stays that week. She gave us until Saturday, the next day, to get all of our stuff back out of the apartment. Technically, I could have fought this decision, because the lease had been signed, and I'm sure there was a clause about giving notice to vacate, but I was just happy to be done with everything. So, the next day we went back to U-Haul, spent more money on another truck rental, and loaded everything up to move out of the apartment.

The roommate and I pretty much handled the move out all ourselves, save the couch and love seat that I asked a neighbor for help with moving. One of the apartment's maintenance guys was supposed to come by and help after I offered to pay someone a little for it, but he didn't show up until later in the day, and by then, we had pretty much all the big stuff in the truck. We left the complex and headed out to find somewhere to store out stuff. Thankfully, I had a one-month-free voucher for U-Haul storage from the original truck rental, so, we had that going for us...for a minute...

After getting to the storage facility nearby and moving some items into the unit, it became clear that the biggest unit they had available was not going to work. So, we went looking to see if another facility close by had something bigger available. They did, but they couldn't transfer the one month free to the other facility. Well, you can imagine how we felt at this point. In the course of a week, we loaded all our stuff into a truck in West Virginia, drove the 800 miles to Florida, couldn't move into the apartment due to a miscommunication, had to rent a motel room, moved into a roach infested apartment, argued with the management about the roaches, moved out of the roach infestation, partially moved into a storage unit, move back out of the unit, and were now being told our one bastion of hope, that free month of storage, was not going to be honored. That was the nail in the coffin.

There had been moments up to this point where the stress of it all got to both of us at different times, but it really hit me hard here, and I felt like my head was going to explode. It was all I could do to not verbally assault the guy behind the counter in front of me, even though he had been nothing but nice. I held in the frustration and went back to the car, and put it to work looking for somewhere else to store our stuff. I found another storage company close by, and we called to secure a room. We spent that night unloading the truck. We then took a further drive to stay somewhere different. The lady that ran the first motel, a Roadway Inn, in Orlando, had been very nice and took excellent care of her facility; she even had a lovely British accent. If we were going to have to stay in a motel, though, we were going to at least enjoy it as much as we could.

We wound up in another motel of the same chain in Daytona Beach. We were literally right on the beach, the one consolation to our current predicament. The lady there gave us a nice weekly rate, which we would pay for the next three weeks. All the while, we'd both be searching for jobs and another apartment, and I would make a trip home for a wedding, and the roommate would binge watch four seasons of Breaking Bad, all the while both wondering if we should just head back home. In the end, we decided we'd come this far, and it would be stupid to back out now. Thankfully, between job interviews and apartment hunting, the details of which I won't bore you with, we would find somewhere much like home, a small town called DeLand.

Next: A little slice of WV in the middle of FL