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Apartment Woes

Latest (Jan 2001) - we were released from our lease and received our deposit back. So, we've upgraded our impressions of the apartment management from sleazy to bungling.

We were unlucky enough to rent an apartment at Traver Ridge. Like everything in Ann Arbor, it was expensive, over $900 per month. Traver Ridge has some good features:

Our Traver Ridge apartment also had a bad feature: Apparently, Traver Ridge will do anything to solve a flooding problem, unless it involves trouble or money. After the first flood, nothing was done. Surprisingly, this did not prevent a second flood. After this, a small quantity of topsoil was placed against an outside wall. This was called "grading". Amazingly enough, this did not prevent a third flood.

Here is the chronology so far.

June 18 - The carpet in the small bedroom (office) of our ground floor apartment was soaked after a rainstorm. The water just oozed up out of the concrete slab. More than half the carpet was sodden.

June 20 - Aparment still had wet carpet, we were thinking about making bumper stickers:
* Wake up and smell the mold at Traver Ridge Apartments
* Traver Ridge - Indoor Swimming Pools
* Traver Ridge - Meet New Friends (crawling under the carpet)

August 6 - our apartment at Traver Ridge partially flooded again, making the whole place smell moldy. The apartment management actually did something this time, connecting some tubing to the end of the gutter down-spouts and emptying a few bags of topsoil against the outside wall. These guys are just so effective, we're sure it won't happen again.

August 8 - loaned a giant electric fan to dry the carpet. Carpet cleaners visited, and did a good job in almost completely removing the mold smell.

Sept 13 - The apartment flooded again. The maintenance man said it was "the worst flooding I've seen since Novi" (which sounded bad, but didn't mean anything to us).

Oct 29 - cleaning out the apartment for the next unlucky renter. The most disgusting thing was a vinyl air mattress. This held moisture against the carpet at the back of the closet, and generated an extensive mold culture. Not sure what the mold was living on, but it was doing very well.

The apartment management didn't give us a refund for any of this, and are now expecting us to pay full rent after being forced out. Welcome to Michigan!

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