We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Out of the Fying Pan

 When Bill saw the listing for the apartment in Dungloe, I was excited. We’d ridden through Dungloe a couple of times and it had a good vibe. The listing looked good, so Bill contacted the letting agent and a few days later, off we went to look at it, deciding to spend the night there. It was a few days before Christmas, and it was lovely to walk around in the mizzle, looking at the festive decorations.

When we viewed the apartment, we asked the letting agent, who also owned the place, if there were mold issues. He said only in the bedroom window well, because the previous guy didn’t ever open the windows. This turned out to be wrong, but at the time we had no way of knowing this. He left us alone to poke around and went back to his office. It didn’t take us long to look at things, because it was quite small, but it did give us a chance to talk it over and come to a decision. We went back to the office and told him we wanted to rent it. We gave him Dick’s contact information, but said he was very uncommunicative, so he might not get a reply. We also gave him the information for the previous letting agent. He did not get in touch with Dick, but made contact with the other guy, so later that day he called and said we could have it and we’d work out details after the festive season. I sent Dick an email giving notice immediately. Once again, we thought we would be going to a place we'd be staying in for years. I didn't realize at the time that I was jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire in some ways.

Over the course of two weeks, going back and forth, we moved in. When I called to deal with Electric Ireland, things were humming along until the guy on the phone suddenly got very agitated. He said there was a problem and he couldn't complete the set-up because no one had taken responsibility for the account for the last 9 months when the place had been vacant. The previous tenant had removed himself and provided the final meter reading, but no one else had stepped in. The electricity was humming along all that time, though--it took us 6 hours to defrost the freezer! Anyway, he told me we shouldn't have to pay the standing charges, VAT, etc for all that time and asked if we knew who should bear responsibility. I said we did and we'd go talk to him. We did, right away. It was late on a Friday afternoon, so we knew nothing would happen that day, but we figured he'd want to be on it Monday morning. LOL. He simply blinked at me in what seemed like a long silence before saying that he'd take care of it the following week and let us know when it was done. A couple weeks later, we got a call from him asking what exactly the problem was again. I told him. An hour or so later, he called back to say it was sorted and I could complete the process.

Meanwhile, we saw that there were issues in the corner where the wardrobe was, but since the bedroom was so small, there was no way to move it anywhere else in the room. There was a small alcove in the living room, so we dragged it out there. The bedroom walls in the corner where the wardrobe had been were wet and had some mold. Eventually, the wall behind the bed also showed mold. I could keep up with it at first and in a matter of weeks, the windows were open all the time and it wasn't so humid so the problem wasn’t as bad. The bathroom was a constant problem. The toilet tank sweated all the time and the floor covering was not installed well. There were soft spot in the floor. The room was always wet, even with the window open all the time, because there was no exhaust fan. I mopped the ceiling a lot.

Summer turned into autumn and eventually it was time to turn on the heat. That’s when the problems really exploded. I walked into the bedroom and saw water dripping down the wall behind the bed. That was the worst wall, along with the entire bathroom, but all the outside walls (which was almost all of them) got wet. Mold patches started appearing on all the ceilings. The bathroom and bedroom were impossible to keep up with. We discovered moldy clothes in the wardrobe. When walking in the bathroom, we had to be careful about where we stepped, lest we fall through. It was hard to get in and out of the shower and the toilet did not seem like it was on solid ground. Things were extremely stressful. One day, I found a small mushroom growing out of the window frame. And we were still in lockdown.

At around the same time as things were going haywire in the apartment, the landlord informed us that he was selling. I told him about all the things that had started happening and he simply blinked at me over his mask. Oddly enough, even though we’d set up a date and time for viewing, and we waited, masked, with all windows open, we got a call saying no one wanted to view the apartment.

He said he thought there was an exhaust fan, so when he found out it didn’t work, he sent someone to fix it. After that, there were new mold patches in the small ‘hallway.’ I came to think that the fan did not vent outside, but into the attic, which I suspect is a mess. I looked for an outside vent and there was none.

At the end of January, there was a knock on the door late one afternoon. It was our new landlord, who had bought the place without looking at it. By then our lease was up and we were actively looking for a new place, but we were in lockdown 3 and could not travel beyond 5km from home. We were hoping for a place to come up in Dungloe, because we liked it there, but no luck. The new landlord asked if we were going to stay. I laid out all the problems. He kept repeating that this would be easy to fix—some insulated boards and installation of vents. I really wasn’t able to talk much about the bathroom, because he kept repeating this, talking over me. He said it would take a few days. This was not really believable. The entire bathroom would have to be taken out, repairs made, and the bathroom reinstalled. Parts of the kitchen would have to get the same treatment. It would take more than a few days and given the way things operate, it could stretch on for a long time. Meanwhile, the walls kept dripping, the mold kept getting worse, the bathroom floor got scarier, and we kept looking. Lockdown dragged on.

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