Good?

Dude! Okay, let's recap here...this may take a while.

So, life has kind of sucked for Paul and I, as you know, for the past while. We have been sick for 10 weeks or so (Paul a little less) and have spent between $5 and $8 000 on medical bills (depending on how you calculate) to try and determine why we are so sick. In the meantime, we get poorer and poorer and more and more screwed. A few weeks ago, when Paul started getting the same symptoms as I we started doing different research and trying to figure out why would both be getting ill. Doctors, they do nothing. WE had to figure out what was wrong because doctors charged us a fortune and took us a whole lot less than seriously and tried to tell us we were anxious and to learn to meditate and here, here's some Ativan. (Okay, I took the Ativan, I ain't gonna turn that down) I looked up various bacterial and viral infections as well as allergies and anything else I could think of until it occurred to us that it may be a mold problem. I posted pictures of the mess we found under the sink, in the baseboards, on a heat register etc. Our apartment manager cleaned those up after numerous phone calls and letters and, well, begging. We were hopeful.

If anything though we began to feel worse. This week we went to yet another doctor, this time for Paul (we sort of alternate between the two of us) and he seemed to take us more seriously. He suggested that we better start moving on this because we were only getting sicker. We didn't really learn anything from him, but we felt that after listening to our stories (mine through my tears) that we weren't 'faking it' or whatever and that we were really sick. He suggested that we dig seriously for the problem. We had been doing everything we could before that but had also been told that our symptoms didn't really match mold related ones so we didn't know what else to do. Well! First I looked up the symptoms of mold illness and out of about 30, I have 17 and Paul has 12. Step one. Next, I gave up on the apartment complex, we had already told them weeks ago that we had a leak in our shower and when they did come out to fix it they simply caulked tiles back into place and, apparently, didn't fix the leak. When we pressed them, verbally and in written form, they told us that there was no way there could be mold behind the shower tiles because they had 'replaced all the sheetrock' when they 'fixed the leak'. I'm no contractor, but I knew that the 20 minutes they spent in our bathroom was, duh, not enough time to have replaced all the sheetrock.

We took matters into our own hands. I crawled into the tub with a knife and pried two random tiles off the wall -

Yeah. So, we hauled our mattress into the living room (the bathroom is in the bedroom, essentially), took our necessities out of the bathroom/bedroom and shut the door. It was too late to do anything more that day so we slept on the floor in the living room...well, slept is an overstatement. We were so upset that I wound up having a little hysterical laughing episode that prevented sleep for quite some time. The next day Paul grabbed one of the shower tiles and hauled ass down to the office. By the end of the day we had a promise that they would be in on Monday to rip out the whole shower and start again. I continued to research this, though, and decided that this was not good enough. The chance of them getting rid of all the mold was slim, and in the meantime, ripping out the shower would trigger a massive release of mold spores and I didn't think we could take it. (After the 5 minutes I was in the shower prying out tiles, I thought I was going to die I felt so awful)

So, Paul went down to the office again the next day and told them that fixing it wasn't good enough...we wanted a new apartment. We worked up an agreement - we would not be charged for any repairs in the apartment (like the carpet etc that the dogs have not done good things to) and we would get to pick from 6 different available apartments. (Now, currently, our apartment costs us $200 less than other 2 bed/2 baths in the complex because when Paul moved in they were desperate for tenants and offered him a huge discount. Even though they raise the rent a lot every year, we're still below what they charge new tenants. The 1 bed/1 baths in the complex are still about $90 more than what we pay for our 2 bed/2 bath.) We even suggested that we go down to a 1 bed/1 bath for the same price as we have now and that swung them in our favor.

So, we spent the next two hours walking around, me with my trusty notebook, deciding which apartment to choose. We decided on the very first one, in the end...isn't it always that way? It is listed as a 1 bed + den/ 1 bath, but I don't know why they say that because its two bedrooms! In Winnipeg if an ad lists a place as 1 bed + den it means 1 bedroom and another room that could be used as a bedroom but they can't say that because it doesn't have a window...but the new place does! Basically we are going from 1250 square feet to 1075 - giving up one bathroom and going from one large and one medium bedroom to one medium and one small bedroom. It is PLENTY of space for us though and still really quite large.

Although we still pay the same price, we are still thinking that this will cost us less per month than the old place. Less space to heat and cool, the ground floor instead of the top floor and instead of facing north with no tree coverage, we face south and are pretty much buried in the trees - great for the endless summers of Georgia. When I sit on my deck now I stare at the leasing office and, in the distance, the road. On the new deck I will be staring into the woods - from about 18 inches away (the dogs will love it).

The new place is similarly laid out but nicer and newer. The carpet and floors are not new, but look in almost perfect shape. The cupboards in the kitchen aren't dark plastic made to look like 'wood'!!! That's a huge one for me. There is a linen closet. The washer and dryer are in their own separate little room. We still get a walk-in closet. It's great :)

This here is our new floor plan, the only differences being that the whole thing is reversed, the walk-in closet is slightly smaller because of the linen closet and we don't have a fireplace:


The thing is, we have to move on Wednesday! Well, we want to, we have to get out of here ASAP for the sake of our health, but I don't know how I'll get it all done in 3 days! We don't have any boxes yet...nothing is packed! And I don't even know how I'll do that since I'm still feeling so awful. I did spend yesterday afternoon calling to transfer our utilities and was thrilled to find out that they can all be hooked up on Wednesday (shocking, I thought). So, tonight, Paul will bring home boxes from work and then we have 3 days to pack up everything (while Paul works double shifts at work) and move. I do NOT know how I will do it. But in the end, we have a NEW APARTMENT!!!

We're scared that we will find out, when we are out of the mold, that in the end that wasn't the problem or that, even if it was, we won't get better without a fortune more in doctor's bills. But, we are trying to be optimistic. Wish us luck!