Got your attention?

I’ve neglected my poor little review blog lately, which is bad because it’s just a baby blog and a weak start doesn’t help drive traffic, but it’s probably a good thing because I’ve been so negative and cranky lately. But with the help of some handmade bath bombs and other yummy body products from a local shop called Maven, I’ve calmed down enough to write a shop review AND offer a giveaway!

Click on over to my re-named and redesigned “Like. Love. WANT.” for a peek into Maven and a chance to win some amazing bath and body goodies!

If they cheered my grumpy ass up, you know they’re worth it.

…and you’ve got to click over to see what Sookie Stackhouse has to do with it.

(I just had to write this and I feel a wee bit better now that I did. And this crankiness is after 11 days of calming down.)

Dear <name redacted> Movers,

You advertise on Craigslist in St. Louis to provide “clean, reliable, and insured” loading and unloading services for $25 per hour, per “strong, experienced” man.

I call bullshit.

I provided the truck, as requested. You provided two sluggish movers – one of whom was probably just 16 – with a dirty van and a trailer that looked like it was used for hauling lawn equipment. Although I had a confirmation for my appointment at 9 am, you insisted that I was not scheduled till 10. and your movers didn’t show up till 10:30 anyway.

This posed a problem.

I reserved the truck for a certain timeframe. When your guys are 90 minutes late, slow-walking, smoke-break-taking, cell phone-talking, dumb-idea-having bums, everything is slowed down. We were only able to make one trip instead of two, which meant that half of my stuff was left at my old house for me to shuttle back and forth BY MYSELF IN A PONTIAC in order to get moved out on time.

So I pretty much hated you before you got there. But seriously? You could have redeemed yourselves by being competent. Or at least nice.

I had everything packed neatly in boxes. I had wrapped the cabinets so doors would stay shut. I had things labeled with where in the new place they were meant to go. I walked your dumb butts through my house and showed you which items were priorities (heavy stuff I can’t move alone) and which we could just smoosh in the extra space. Since, after all, we were down to one trip and I had to prioritize.

And you immediately began to take the low priority items outside WHY? Were you TRYING to piss me off?

Let me educate you on a few points.

• It does not take two people to take apart a bed frame. Or assemble one. Or remove or replace a mirror on a dresser. This means that one of you can be doing something else. Something productive. And if I see you standing still, I will GIVE you something to do.
• Your 5 smoke breaks in four hours are not paid time and I dare you to argue with me on that point when I write the check.
• Asking a girl if you can put her light beige sofa in a nasty-ass trailer is never a good idea. Put it in the nice, clean truck that I rented for this express purpose. And cover it.
• And for the love of Baby Jesus, do not think that rubbing at a spot on the light beige sofa with YOUR DIRTY HANDS will make it any better. Quite the opposite, I assure you.
• Do not even ask if you can just strap my mattress, UNCOVERED, to the roof of your van “because it’s easier” when it looks like it’s going to rain. I will not let you, and it WILL rain. This. Is why. I got. The truck.
• Put shit where you are told to put it in the new place, or I will make you move it again. Don’t look at me like I’m the psycho bitch from hell. I hired you because I can’t move that giant desk by myself. Oh wait, obviously you can’t move it with TWO people because you did crack the support on it, didn’t you?

But I won’t file a claim on my couch cleaning or my damaged desk. I won’t call your boss to complain about your inadequacies. Because I never want to hear from you again.

Disgustedly,

Rebekah

P.S. Did you get that email thread that I found and re-sent to you? The one where I asked for the movers at 9:00 and you confirmed it? Yeah. I keep that stuff. You should try it.

P.S. #2: If you see this letter on the internet and think I am being libelous, think again – I am being GRACIOUS by not associating the name of your sorry excuse for a company with this craptastic moving experience.

It’s a double-edged sword, this dishwasher of mine.

When I was first viewing the apartment, I shook my head at the kitchen, noting the absence of a dishwasher.

“It’s kind of a deal-breaker for me,” I commented. “I’m lazy and I like machines to do the work.”

The apartment broker rushed to assure me that they are redoing kitchens in their properties one by one, and dishwashers were coming. In the meantime, she said, she’d be happy to order a portable dishwasher for me to use, and I could pass it on to another tenant if my kitchen was renovated during the time I lived there.

Right on.

My brand-spankin’-new portable dishwasher arrived on move-in day (like I needed another box, right?) and I pushed it into a corner while I focused on the mess with the movers. We ate off paper plates for awhile.

A few days ago, I decided to take all the foam and plastic out of the thing and try it out. Roll to sink. Remove unicouple and hose from back. Attach unicouple to the faucet by twisting – -

Oh. The faucet doesn’t have threads on which to twist the unicouple. The instructions inform me that my local hardware store should have some sort of adapter.

I unscrew the entire faucet and the unicouple adapter and put them in a bag, then slog off to the True Value hardware store a few blocks from my house.

“Please help,” I asked the old man behind the counter, showing him the stuff. “This needs to go onto this but it doesn’t have a thing.”

The old man screws up his lips and ponders the pieces for a moment, then walks silently to a rack of approximately ten zillion pieces of plumbing. He deftly plucks one from a hook, opens the package, and screws it onto my faucet head.

$3.59. All right.

Except that it didn’t entirely work.

I put the faucet back on the sink, put the gasket on the new threaded piece, and screw on the unicouple adapter. The unicouple clicks right on, nice and snug. Too bad that when I turn on the hot water to test the connection I get a wee bit of a hot shower in my kitchen.

I dig out a wrench and give the adapter a good crank.

Another shower.

I unscrew the whole apparatus, remove the gasket, and wrap it in plumbers’ tape. Gasket back on, adapter back on, tighten like hell.

Not a spray, but an aggressive dribble. I swear my cat was laughing at me.

I give up for the evening and have my Hot Pocket dinner on a paper plate. The next day I am back to the hardware store to get a second gasket to reinforce the first. More plumber’s tape on, twist twist twist, click the unicouple into place.

No drips!

I dance over to the counter and plug the machine in. I put soap in the container and a few dirty dishes in it to test the thing out. But before turning it on, I push a button to release the water pressure from the hose where I tested the adapter. Splash, into the sink – and the sink doesn’t drain.

Then it does. Very. Slowly.

Not good.

I find a bottle of Drano in my box of cleaning supplies and tip it down the drain. Fifteen minutes elapse and I am supposed to flush it down with hot water. Which, of course, drains only marginally better than it did before. I pick up the Drano jug and notice that it’s still heavy… turns out that whatever active ingredient is in it has settled to the bottom in a sort of bluish sludge, which I scrape out with a knife and poke down the drain in hopes that maybe it will help.

After another fifteen minutes and another flush of hot water, the sink drains a bit better. Adapter on, unicouple clicked into place, water test, no leaks – GO!

I refuse to leave the kitchen while the washer is running, so fortunately I am close by unpacking plates when I hear a little  noise.

Drip. Drip.

The adapter is dripping. But it’s just a little drip.

I go back to my unpacking. And the noise becomes a high pitched whistle. There is a small, fine spray coming from the adapter. But it’s just a little spray.

I can hear the water in the machine splashing around during the wash part of the cycle, so I know that whatever is in there is a soapy mess and I do not want to stop it right now. So I unpack some more.

Then it’s a bigger spray. I have visions of a deluge of biblical proportions.

I give in and crank the dial to “off” and undo the adapter. It gets another layer of plumbers’ tape and another good crank with the wrench, then I smack the unicouple back into place and set the machine to “rinse only.”

I still get a little dribble as the machine finishes out its cycle, but all I am praying for at that point is that I’m not sending a ton of rinsewater into a machine already full of soapy water, thus flooding the kitchen. But it all miraculously drains into the sink without overflowing, and I triumphantly detach the tubes and cords.

“Ha HAH!” I shout. “I win!”

E comes in from the living room and pats me on the back. “Good job, honey,” he says, relieved that he won’t have to deal with The Crazy anymore that night. “Let’s see how the thing did.”

I pull out a plate. It looks shiny and clean. He pulls out a fork. It has soapy sludge on the tines.

We both frown.

“What did we do with the paper plates?”

That last post, the happy one about the awesomeness of the new apartment?

It went a bit downhill from there.

It’s not the apartment itself, really, just the moving process and every snafu, glitch, and bump in the road for the last two weeks. I’ve been intentionally holding out on blogging these experiences because I was Little Miss Bitchy McNegative pretty much 24/7 and I didn’t want this to become my complaint platform. Mama said if you don’t have something nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all.*

So I whined to E instead, as he is required by terms of the boyfriend contract to listen and comfort and carry heavy things.

But the house sale is closed and everything is moved, and I’ve been looking for the positive side of these things that have caused me so much stress. I might write later about the whole experience, including the negatives,  when I can laugh about them and not just whine and complain. But there have been a few real blessings in disguise and I’m focusing on those right now on the slow journey back to sanity.

I locked myself out of the new apartment.

On Day One, I found myself in the back stairwell of the four-flat, with no house keys, car keys, or cell phone. How was I supposed to know the back door would immediately latch behind me? I walked out to the front yard and pondered my second floor balcony. If I could get up there, I could get in through the unlocked screen door. The grade of the yard rendered my six-foot ladder useless, and the overhang of the balcony made a climb pretty much impossible for me. Damn.

I knocked on my second-floor neighbor’s door. Her balcony is separated from mine by a jumpable fence, so I thought I could just go through there. And she wasn’t home.

So I was standing dumbly on the sidewalk, looking up and wondering if the corner shop down the street would let me use their phone to call a locksmith, when a couple that looked like they’d just stepped out of an REI catalog stepped out of the house next door to take their huge, friendly dog for a walk.

We got to chatting and I asked them if they knew of a locksmith or would be willing to let me use their phone. And good god, the guy half of the couple took off down the driveway and retrieved a freaking fireman’s ladder from their garage while the giant dog tried to make friends with me by rubbing up on my legs like a cat and almost knocking me over.

So up I went, and promised them cookies as soon as I find my baking stuff in the mountain of boxes. It was a hell of a way to meet neighbors, but it’s nice to find out that you live near such good people. And a massive dog.

The landlords didn’t paint the walls.

There was a wee misunderstanding about that. During the walk-through, I commented about the state of the walls and that they would need to be re-painted and I would like colors. The landlord told me to pick out my colors from Sherwin Williams and she’d take care of it.

She meant she’d take care of getting me the paint at their hefty discount.

I now have four very large buckets in my study and I was MAAAAAD.

The last thing I wanted to worry about with all the moving craziness was having to paint every room in a whole apartment. I felt gypped.

The blessing in disguise is that I’ve looked and looked at these rooms as I’ve been setting things up, and the more I ponder my decorating, the more I want to flip-flop some of the colors from their original plans. Blue in the living room and bathroom now, yellow in the kitchen and hall instead of vice versa.

So I’ll have to work a little, but it’s not like I don’t know how to paint. And now it will be the way I really want it.

———————

*Like I REALLY abide by that, right?

Here’s a followup to the Want/Do Not Want checklists from the apartment-hunting post. This isn’t the one in the photos from the previous post, but needless to say,  I am QUITE pleased… My Wants:

• a pre-war building that has been renovated (check)
• windows that are not drafty (doesn’t SEEM like they are, and have storm windows)
• a proper kitchen with a dishwasher (portable dishwasher, AND giant re-glazed farmhouse sink!)
• a parking spot (Reserved! And covered!)
• either 2 bedrooms or a large one-bedroom (large one-bedroom with eat-in kitchen)
• a pantry (check)
• a patio or a balcony or a deck (balcony with enough space for small grill, small table and 2 chairs)
• 2nd or 1st floor ONLY (2nd floor)
• lots of windows (8 including 2 stained glass, plus french doors front and back)
• extra basement storage (check)
• allows cat (duh)

I do NOT want:

• carpet (check – original, refinished wood floors win!)
• ceilings lower than 10 feet (well, 9 feet will do.)
• windows without wood trim and wide sills (check – original woodwork in great condition)
• window unit air conditioning instead of central air (check)
• street parking (see above)
• anything under 725 square feet (got about 800)
• a building with more than 8 units (it’s a four-flat)

And it would be nice if I had:

• a quick walk to the 59 bus line (nope, but I have the 16 and 57)
• a quick walk to at least a little shop, if not a grocery store, for booze snack runs (2 blocks, check)
• a linen closet (and a HUGE living room closet, check!)
• garage parking (carport, which is just fine)
• crown molding (check)
• an electric stove (negative, but oh well)

Bonuses!

• Small screen room off the bedroom. I grew up with screen porches on every house I lived in and good god, I have missed having one.
• A big cabinet in the bathroom with a space underneath where my towel warmer will fit perfectly. I NEED my towel warmer.
• Landlord had not repainted since the last tenant moved out, so she sent me to Sherwin Williams to PICK MY OWN COLORS and she’s having “her people” take care of it. That saves me a ridiculous amount of money and time, because paint would have been my first project. Now I can spend my money on window treatments!

(bedroom, kitchen, study, living room)

And here’s where you haters chime in… ‘cause I’m getting this for $600 a month. Feel free to spout off about your jealousy of the cost of living in Saint Louis.