As you go throughout college, you move around. From home to dorms, and from dorms to your own apartment, you look for the cleanest, and best fit for you and your roommates. Looking for a place that is close to campus, your job, and one that is not going to leave you bankrupt is very important. It seems that even the worst quality homes are so expensive. So you suck it up and work hard to pay the bills. When you finally get to move in, that’s when the fun should begin.
I moved into a home in Greeley, CO on Monday May 15, 2017. My roommate Hannah and I rented the basement of a home, a basement apartment. It had all that we wanted for the right price. There were two bedrooms, living room, full bath, closet, small storage, and a kitchen. We were so excited. We got to set it up and make it our own, starting in the summer and lasting until next May!
Knowing Colorado, it is quite indecisive about the weather, on almost a daily basis. So I went off to my new job as a nanny. I get a call halfway through my shift, it's about our kitchen.
“Amelia, our refrigerator is flooding, or maybe our house. It is raining a lot.”
So I head home. Walking up to my front door was the awful start. A pool of 3-4 inches of water blocking the door. So I started scooping the water up with a salad bowl and throwing it into the grass. About 30 minutes later, I was finally able to go inside. I found my roommate trying to soak up all the water that was coming from our floor baseboards, with towels. A friend came over and we started ringing out the towels to get rid of the water. Finally, our landlord answered the phone and had someone bring a shopvac over to suck up the water. This bucket held 12 gallons of water. It took 3 full buckets to clear out the front entry way. As we would get the water cleaned up in our kitchen and closet, the front door drain just kept pushing water up. Our upstairs neighbors were kind and helped us by clearing the gutters and digging a water channel in the backyard, away from the house. As all of this was going on, it was still pouring rain, and snowing. We were vacuuming water for 6 hours before our landlord came and took over.
We were supposed to sleep at a hotel for the night but we were not allowed because neither of us were 21 years old, so we crashed at a close friend's house for the night. We woke up to our phones ringing at about 7:30am the next day, it was the landlord. We needed to get out. There was no way to stop the water, because the ground and water table was so saturated from the rain. Luckily, our parents were able to come up to help us move. We packed up our whole house that we had just unpacked 3 days before, and moved into another basement apartment, temporarily.
Our apartment is being fixed, and then we will get to move back in. Until then, we are living out of boxes for a few months!
So my advice to all you future apartment renters: do not get a basement, especially in rainy seasons.
