We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Things Get Worse

 As this year began, we were at the beginning of lockdown 3 or 4—I don’t remember now. We still had a couple weeks to run on our lease. We continued to look anyway, even though we were limited to within 5 km of where we were. We both hoped something would come up in Dungloe, because we both liked the town and would have been happy to stay. It was the apartment we wanted to leave. Nothing came up in Dungloe, but there were places elsewhere, beyond our reach. In the end, we passed on 10 or 11 places during the lockdown that we would have at least tried to look at. Some of them stayed listed for a long time, so we sort of held our breath and hoped they’d be around whenever we could move around again. They didn’t.

After a few months, things started slowly easing and various things could start up again, including construction. This was bad news for us. We lived right across the street from an old hotel. It’s over 120 years old, but had been uninhabitable for some years. There were crumbling outbuildings behind and to the side of it. Unbeknownst to us when we moved there, someone had bought it and gotten planning permission to ‘refurbish’ it, although the only usable part of the place was the shell of the main building. Even that needed extensive work and in between lockdowns, they had taken off the roof and gotten a new covering on and replaced the dormer windows. The scaffolding had been built and they were in it for the long haul. They knocked down the outbuildings. Then everything paused. Once they were able to start working again, things got even more annoying for us. The ground is full of granite. It was warm and we had windows open. And we began to be awakened by some jerk in his digger pounding rocks, first at 8, then 7, and finally he was out there at 6 am. Bang! Bang! Bang! Summer is my worst time of year. I do not sleep well and am awake far too early anyway. It was worse this year because I did not get my usual rest and recovery time in autumn and winter because of the state of the apartment. The bedroom was always wet and the sheets damp. This banging would send me into a rage. I was aware that this rage was not helpful and tried to work on it. I was partly successful at this, but I was depressed and exhausted. We later learned that he had come from a village 45 minutes away to prepare the ground for the day’s work ahead, because he was the one with the equipment. I looked in vain to find out where I could file a complaint—6am is too early for that kind of thing. But all I found were suggestions about taking people to court.

Once Digger Dude was done playing with his rocks, we were treated to the sound of pile drivers or jack hammers or some loud crap for the rest of the day. We couldn’t listen to the radio, we had to yell at each other at times to make ourselves heard, and we were not thinking good thoughts about the owners of the future ‘boutique hotel.’ We kept searching.

By now, we could move freely, but there were very few places available. There’s a housing shortage here, for both buyers and renters and many people, anticipating a big staycation summer, opted to do AirBnB or other short term lets. Rents went up. People were more demanding in their requirements. We learned that we needed letters of reference from previous landlords/letting agents before we could even be placed on a list to view, so Bill requested the letters going back 5 years. In what was a surprise to neither of us, Dick did not respond. Perhaps knowing he is not up to the task, he has hired someone to work in the office. She was professional and nice and said she would get us the letter. Dick had other ideas. After 4 attempts, Bill gave up. Dick moved up a few places in the hierarchy of dickdom. We had letters from the people before and after him and those would work.

We discovered that if we hesitated at all, we would probably not get to view a place, so we started jumping on listings as soon as we saw them. We looked at the basics and if those were OK, Bill contacted them. Sometimes further investigation caused us to decide the place wasn’t for us after all, but if we’d waited, we wouldn’t have a chance. 

Meanwhile, I woke up one day to a toilet issue. I was barely awake when I flushed, but I woke up quickly when water started spraying from the pipe connecting the tank to the bowl. I mopped up the floor, filled a bucket for future flushes, and waited until a decent hour to call the landlady. She called me back and said her husband would be there midday. We used the public bathrooms around the corner until he arrived. He experienced the bathroom floor. He said it was a priority and would be in touch in a day or two so it could be fixed within a couple of weeks. It would just take a day or two. He would remove everything in the bathroom, put more supports in the floor, fix the floor, and put everything back. Just a day or two, right. In any case, we were never to know how long it would take because when we left 12 weeks later, we had still not heard from him.

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