The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

For most of my adult life I've lived in a variety of shit rental apartments. Here are some of them.

2005-6: Student accommodation

Rent: £57 a week

Deposit withheld: None. To the credit of the university, they returned the entire deposit back to me when I moved out

At the tender age of 18, I moved into student accommodation on my uni's campus. My mom wrote about the shocking event in a letter to her cousin:

The latest thing in this house came out of the blue – Paul decided that he wanted to live on the university campus even though we are only ten minutes bus drive away. I thought he was bluffing but he upped and went last week. Trouble is though he has to pay rent for the whole term till the end of June, £57 a week! [...] Paul has never been away from home before and can only make toast and microwave meals but he is determined to do it. He is over eighteen so I can't stop him.

What makes me cry bitter tears of laughter about that letter is the "£57 a week" with an exclamation mark to indicate what a great deal of money that was. £57 a week! That's a bloody bargain compared to the rest of the places I've lived in, as you'll soon see. £57 a week! If only I could find a place that cheap now!

So what was the student accommodation like? Well, the uni described the accommodation as "modern" and I have never heard a greater lie since.

I shared the flat with eleven other students. Eleven. There was no living room, just a communal kitchen. The sink was always full of unwashed pots and pans as you'd expect when twelve students share the same kitchen. The kitchen smelled of pasta because that's all we knew how to cook.

Anyway, the bathroom had no bath, so it was one of those bathrooms where 'bathroom' was a funny misnomer (or it would have been funny if I hadn't been living there). Instead of baths, we had two showers, communal showers they were, facing each other and without any kind of divider to separate them, as if two people were going to get naked and take a shower together.

The windows only opened a crack because they didn't want drunk students falling to their deaths. To be fair, it was probably a good thing they made the windows like that. People were often getting drunk and besides, you can't pay your tuition fee to the university if you're dead.

The fire alarm would go off about once a week, usually at two in the morning. Sometimes it was due to a drunken bastard who thought that setting the fire alarm off at night was funny, and other times it was because someone had burned toast. You could never tell. All we knew was that we had to congregate outside the building and wait for the firemen to come. Sometimes they took half an hour to arrive even though there was a fire station literally right on the campus. I'm not exaggerating. Our campus had a fire station. While we waited for the firemen to wake up and drive a hundred metres, we would stand around in the meantime, fucking freezing. We would all be wearing pyjamas and dressing gowns which was an odd sight. I kept hoping one or two girls would be nude or at least wearing lingerie but it was never the case. At most, there was once a hairy guy wearing nothing but a towel. He had been taking a shower when the alarm went off, and he thought it was funny to be outside with nothing but a towel on. He wasn't laughing half an hour later when his nipples were freezing off, that's for sure.

One night, I woke up to find that my bedroom was on fire. The cupboard, the desk, the chair, the bed - all in flames. There's not much scarier than waking up to find your whole bedroom's on fire. I was about to leap out of bed and run for the stairs, but then I realised there was no fire. It had just been a nightmare - the kind of nightmare you get when you've become conditioned to a fire alarm waking you up at 2 am every morning. It was the most vivid and terrifying hallucination I've ever had.

2007: Sleaford

Rent: £50 a week

Deposit withheld: Everything (£200)

The house was decaying and falling apart. I never did find out how many people were crammed in there. It was hard to tell because everyone stayed in their rooms.

The only time we saw the landlord was when he came round every week for his rent. He wanted the rent in cash even though direct debits were already a thing back then. No matter that a direct debit would have been more reliable and less hassle for all parties involved; he wanted his money in cold, hard cash. The reason for this, I presume, is because cash is untraceable and so he never had to pay any tax on his rental income.

One night, I was so lonely that I knocked on a random bedroom door to see if anyone was in and wanted to go for a drink. The door opened and there were ten Polish people in there. They were old people, young people, and every age in between.

Everyone turned to look at me.

"Er, hello," I said.

They all had drunk, happy faces. They were having some kind of party. It seemed like the type of party Eastern Europeans like to have, which is to say they were getting drunk on hard liquor in a white, featureless room.

"I just wondered if anyone wants to go for a drink?" I asked.

They look confused. They couldn't speak English, despite being in England. Luckily there was one man there who could speak English. He translated what I said for the rest of the group. Then everyone went "Ahh" in collective understanding. Then they shook their heads to say 'no'.

I smiled, and said, "Okay then, no worries!" They shut the door in my face.

Weird. Maybe they all lived in the one bedroom? As an extreme way to save money. Then again, probably they were just having a party. I'll never know.

Anyway. My bedroom was white on all four walls. So I decided to spruce up my bedroom by painting one of the walls red. I bought a tin of paint, a brush, everything. It took me three hours to paint the wall but when I was finished, I felt a sense of satisfaction.

I shouldn't have bothered though because a week later, I was fired from my job and I immediately moved back home. The landlord kept my entire deposit because I'd failed to give him four weeks' notice before moving out, as stipulated in the contract.

2009: House of the witch

Rent: £50 a week

Deposit withheld: None, although they almost deducted money for holes I made in the wall to put up shelves. But I bought some wall filler and white paint and fixed the holes, good as new.

It was okay in the beginning. It was just me and a lesbian couple living there. The two girls were in their teens or early 20s and they shared the bedroom next to mine. This sounds like the dream of every heterosexual man but unfortunately, I never got to have a threesome with them. In hindsight, that's probably not surprising considering lesbians aren't into men.

Still though, I was living in the same house as two lesbian girls — living in the bedroom next to theirs, in fact — so there was that at least.

But then the lesbian girls had a fight (a fight with arguments, not jelly and bikinis). They broke up and moved out.

For a day or two I had the house to myself, but then the landlord moved in, as well as his girlfriend and his girlfriend's eight-year-old daughter.

The bin always seemed to be overflowing but no one ever took it out. As far as I know, I was the only one who ever took the bin out. The people who lived there would watch me struggle with the overflowing bin bag, a perplexed expression on their faces, as if taking a full bin bag out and replacing it with a new one was something new and strange, like a caveman trying to show them how to make fire by rubbing two sticks together.

One night, the eight-year-old daughter was having a sleepover with her friend. They were chatting and giggling. The noise was keeping me awake because their bedroom was next to mine. So I got up and knocked on the door. Immediately they fell silent.

I opened the door and poked my head in. "Sorry, but could you possibly keep the noise down?" I said. "I'm trying to sleep."

The two kids stared at me, terrified.

The next day, the mom marched up to me, furious.

"How dare you tell my daughter to be quiet!" she shouted at me. So her daughter had told her what had happened the night before. The little snitch.

"All I asked was her if she could keep the noise down," I said perfectly reasonably. "I was trying to sleep."

"That doesn't matter! She's only eight years old! You should always go to the parents first with these kinds of things!" she said.

After she had calmed down, she was still shaking her head in disbelief. "You should always go to the parents first with these kinds of things," she was still saying. "It's common sense."

Unfortunately, I've always lacked common sense. And social skills, for that matter. And now I was living in the social equivalent of a minefield. One wrong move or interaction with her eight-year-old and the mom would be at me again like a dog with rabies.

So I decided not to talk to the eight-year-old girl anymore. In fact, I stopped talking to anyone in the house. I kept myself to myself. I became the strange, silent lodger who lives at the top of the stairs.

One day not long after, the whole family (there were somehow six of them at this point - relatives kept coming over to visit) were having a barbeque in the garden. I wasn't invited, of course, so I sat in my room. I could hear Disney songs playing from the girl's bedroom. A Whole New World and Hakuna Matata. The music was annoying and loud. I figured the landlord's 8-year-old daughter had left the music on by accident so I went into her bedroom and turned it off.

The next thing I knew, her mom was running up the stairs on all fours like the girl from The Ring. "How DARE you go into my daughter's room!" she screamed. "HOW DARE YOOOOOU!". She really was furious. I've never seen such fury before or since.

Immediately after that traumatic experience, I looked for a new place to stay. I left a few days later.

2009-11: Some old guy's house in Bournemouth

Rent: £360 a month, going down to £260 a month when I moved into a smaller bedroom

Deposit withheld: £30 for breaking a chair

This was a nice house in the suburbs. The landlord, Andy, was a nice guy.

Unfortunately, he was still a landlord which makes him an evil bastard in my book.

Andy was a clean freak. Everything had to be clean at all times. Somehow I ended up having to clean the toilet, inside as well as out. I must have spent half an hour scrubbing Andy's toilet to get it to his standards.

This one time, he said the carpets looked dirty (maybe don't choose white carpets??) and he made me rent a carpet cleaner for £50 of my own money, and then made me clean all the carpets in the house. Never mind that I was already paying £360 a month to him.

He was also obsessed with the bills. If I left one light on, he'd tell me about it. And the winters were cold because Andy wouldn't let me turn the radiators on.

His ex-wife hated him. I wonder why.

Andy got a girlfriend at one point. Before I met her, he described her as "a really nice lady with a great body too. A really sexy body, you know?"

Now, Gillian did NOT have a sexy body. Gillian was in her fifties. She would be collecting her pension soon. She wasn't fat though so maybe that's why Andy meant when he said she had a sexy body. When you're old, like Andy, anyone who is not fat has a 'sexy body'.

At one point, every night, Gillian would stay over. I'd be in the living room watching the television and then Andy and Gillian would pop their heads in and say, "We're just off to bed! Goodnight!"

"Goodnight!" I'd say.

Then Andy would pop his head in again. "Don't forget to turn off all the lights when you're done." Always trying to save money and reduce his bills.

Then Andy and Gillian would go upstairs, giggling. Then would come the rhythmic creaks of Andy's bed. Soon Gillian would start going "OH! OH! OH! OH! OH!" Every. Night. The same thing: the sound of old people having sex. I shouldn't have had to listen to that. No one should have to listen to that. It should be in the Geneva Convention as a banned form of torture. At the very least, Andy should have given me a discount on my rent for the psychological trauma he inflicted on me.

On the day I moved out, Andy said, "There's just the matter of the broken chair?"

"What broken chair"

"The chair you sit in all the time? It's broken."

Oh. That broken chair. The one I broke by leaning back on it too hard.

"I'll have to deduct sixty pounds from your deposit for it," Andy said.

"It wasn't me who broke it though," I lied. "It was Kevin." If you're ever accused of something, blame it on someone else.

He looked surprised. "But Kevin never sits on that chair."

"Oh, he sits on it a lot," I said. "All the time in fact."

In the end, Andy agreed to deduct only thirty pounds from my deposit.

2013-15: Tower block apartment in Montreal

Rent: 800 Canadian dollars a month

Deposit withheld: $20

As landlords go this was the best I ever had. The tower block was run by this man and woman who were actually nice people. Our deposit paid for the last month's rent so there was no fight to get the deposit back from them.

Though the apartment was a bit small. It only had one window, for one thing. I don't mean one window per room, I mean one window in total.

Also, one morning, I was getting ready for work when came the sound of a woman screaming in the apartment next door. Like this: "WaaaAAAAAAARHHHHHHH!!!" Then came her wails, howls and sobbing. The sounds of grief. Anyway, I thought nothing of it and went downstairs to get the bus for work. On the street, the police had set up a cordon in the alleyway next to the building. Someone had jumped off their balcony and killed themselves.

The crying woman must have been his mom or his wife. I never found out though because I didn't talk to the neighbours.

Anyway, my point is, isn't it rude when people in other apartments make noise in the morning? She should have saved her mourning until after morning.

Enough about suicide and onto a much more important topic: cockroaches. Occasionally, I'd open a kitchen cupboard and there would be a cockroach in there. Just, you know, a cockroach, chilling out in the kitchen cupboard. All normal. They wouldn't even run away. They'd just stare at me, like stoners. "Hey man," the cockroaches would say. "You're looking good today."

The management knew about the pest problem. Just a few days after we moved in, a notice appeared in the lobby of the apartment building. I can't remember what it said word for word but I can remember the gist of it, which was this:

Notice from the management:

COCKRAOCHES/Extermination

As we all know, this building is infested with COCKROACHES

Extermination will take place on 10th September

This will involve using POISON so ensure ALL your belongings are in GARBAGE BAGS on that day to avoid getting POISON on your BELONGINGS

Failure to do this could result in POISON on your BELONGINGS

Thank You and have a nice day!

So we put all our stuff into bin bags. That was easy because we didn't own much anyway.

On the promised day, the exterminator came. I watched him spray a little bit of poison in our kitchen cupboards and that was it.

"Hang on, is that it?" I asked.

"Yup," he said.

"You're not gonna, like, spray poison across the whole room or anything?"

"Nope."

The poison didn't even work because every day thereafter, I still saw cockroaches running around happily in the poisoned kitchen cupboards. This suggests the poison did nothing except give the cockroaches something to play with, or mutated the cockroaches, making them stronger and possibly hyper-intelligent. I never did find out which one it was.

The other interesting thing about that apartment was the girl stealing our rent. Our apartment was a sublet and we paid rent to a Canadian girl called Charlotte. She was then supposed to pass on the rent to the building's manager.

That was the idea anyway. What actually happened is that Charlotte kept our rent for herself and then disappeared. We found out about this one day went the building's manager came to see us.

"Hey, do you guys know where Charlotte is?"

"Not here," I said.

"Well she owes more than $2,000 to the building."

Another day, a debt collector banged on our door. I opened the door.

"Is Charlotte here?" he said.

"No," I said.

He went away, disappointed.

I believe they never found her.

When Charlotte's lease was up, the building made a new lease with us. It worked out well. We paid the rent on time, every month ($850, bills included), and in return they let us live indoors instead of on the street.

Also, I never got the $20 deposit back for my keys when I moved out.

2015: Flatshare in Dublin

Rent: €650 a week (I think)

Deposit withheld: £20 for a broken shelf in the fridge. I don't think it was Girlfriend and me who broke it but still: $20 deducted.

My girlfriend and I shared an apartment with a couple from Barcelona and Venezuela. They were nice people but fucking horrible to live with. They would routinely leave the sink full of dirty pans and plates. They would do the laundry and then hang their clothes all over the furniture to dry because they were too miserly to use the tumble dryer.

One time they got married and they invited all their cousins to stay in the apartment. So there were four people sleeping in the living room, which was a fucking nightmare.

2016-17: Dublin

Rent: €600 a week (I think)

Deposit withheld: None.

Not much to say about this one. One notable thing was that the fire alarm for the whole building would frequently go off for no reason; the worst was when the alarm sounded all night in one of the adjacent buildings. No one seemed to care or do anything. If there had been an actual fire then they would have all been burned alive. It would have served them right for their indifference.

One day, I was in the bathroom, and when I went to open the door and leave, the door handle fell off in my hand. I couldn't get the handle back on. And without the door handle, there was no way to open the door. I yelled and banged on the door as loud as I could. No one came to help, even though one of my flatmates was in and she could hear me. I tried to kick the door down but all that did was hurt my foot. In the movies they make it look easy to kick doors down, but trust me, in real life it's impossible.

Finally, after half an hour of being trapped in the bathroom, I made a makeshift handle out of some tweezers and managed to escape.

2017: Cork

Rent: €1,300 a month

Deposit withheld: None

The rent on this apartment was €1,300 a month if you can believe that. I certainly can't believe it, and I was the one paying it. Well, to be fair, the company my girlfriend was working for (Google) was paying €400 of the rent, leaving my girlfriend and me to split the rest of the rent between us 50/50.

What does €1,300 a month get you in Cork? I'll tell you what it gets you.

• We had no heating for the first week. I soon discovered the boiler was empty. I tried turning the valve to fill the boiler with water. Nothing. Turned out the pipes under the floorboards in the living room had leaks. Every time I was tring to fill the boiler, I was actually filling the floor with more water.

• The letting agency forced us to use a pay-as-you-go for our electricity bill, due to worries we would run away and leave the landlord to pay for a month's worth of electricity (God forbid).
• Specks of mould on the walls
• I remember a gas man coming one day to inspect some meters, and he shook his head in shock and disbelief and said something like "Jesus, this could cause an explosion." This was pipes carrying deadly gas.

And then there was the:

Hysterical fire alarm: The building had a loud, hysterical fire alarm. The alarm would go off if you so much as thought about burning toast, let alone actually burned toast. The only way to turn off the fire alarm was to hold a button right next to the alarm while your eardrums got shot to bits and you suffered permanent hearing loss.

It is impossible to exaggerate how loud this fire alarm was. It was as loud as a jumbo jet taking off. I never measured the exact number of decibels but I'm sure they were in the millions. Standing next to the alarm while it was going off actually caused my ears physical pain. Why did the fire alarm have to be so goddamn loud?? I mean, I understand the importance of getting everyone outside in the event of a fire, but does the alarm have to destroy my eardrums in the process?? This is a serious question. Like many people, I have never been in a fire but I do suffer from tinnitus, tinnitus that's made worse by loud fire alarms. My guess is that people think the louder the alarm, the better, just in case there's a partially deaf person in the building. Well, there is a partially deaf person in the building: me, after having suffered hearing loss due to the fire alarm.

One time, I was walking home and, three streets from the building, I already could hear the alarm. No one in the building gave a shit or attempted to turn it off. I don't know how long the alarm had been sounding but it could have been all day. When I got closer to the building, through one of the top windows I could see a man looking down at me, scowling. He was just sitting in his bedroom. I guess he didn't know how to turn the fire alarm off so he was just sitting there, suffering from this ultraloud fire alarm. He must have been sitting there for a while, listening to the alarm, because he looked thoroughly miserable. He looked just like the people in the Doctor Who episode The Angels Take Manhattan, the people who are trapped in a bedroom their whole lives and only have one window to look out of. As miserable as that.

Shitty upstairs neighbours: We never met our upstairs neighbours but I got to know them well based on all the noise they made. Throughout the day, I could hear a man singing awful renditions of pop songs. If he knew I was listening, then he didn't care, because he would sing loudly and passionately, as if he was a rock star and not just an arsehole with an awful singing voice.

But that's not the worst thing. The worst thing was the noise at night. Our upstairs neighbours (hereon referred to as "The Neighbours From Hell") were fond of late-night parties. There was many a night when Girlfriend (pregnant at the time) and I would lie in bed, unable to sleep, because of the music, the shrieks of drunken laughter, the loud conversations, and the ca-CLACK ca-CLACK of high heels on wooden, carpetless floors. You wouldn't believe the amount of noise a pair of high heels can make on a wooden floor. At 3 am it's the worst sound in the world, as I can attest from personal experience. I later found out it's illegal in Ireland to have carpetless, wooden floors in apartment buildings, because it creates noisy situations just like this one.

During each of these parties, I would lie in bed, unable to sleep, and imagine shooting the revellers above me with an arsenal of weapons. Each imaginary weapon was satisfying in its own way. The sniper rifle was good for blasting their stupid heads off, one by fucking one. The pistol was good for pretending to be James Bond and methodically shooting each person in their heart, head or limbs, while they ran around screaming, wondering where the shots were coming from. But the best weapon, which I used at 4 am when I thought I couldn't take anymore, was the rocket launcher, which I imagined firing straight up into the ceiling, destroying their entire apartment and killing everyone inside.

And every so often I'd imagine lobbing a grenade through the ceiling, with the explosion killing half the revellers (especially the ones wearing high heels) while the other half panicked and ended up cowering in a corner, where I could get to work on them with an AK47.

It never made any difference though. They still made loads of noise.

When we gave our notice to leave, the letting agency made us find replacement tenants. So I showed potential tenants around the apartment, and for an hour or so I had a feeling of what it must be like to be a landlord: an unearned sense of self-importance; pretty girls smiling at me, hoping their flattery would get me the apartment; men asking me practical questions and showing an interest in what I had to say.

In the end, a Polish couple got the apartment. The guy messaged me a few weeks later complaining about the noise of the upstairs neighbours. I felt sympathy for him but I was also glad it wasn't me living there anymore.

Time taken to return the deposit: Three months. And I had to email the agency multiple times to get the deposit back. It wasn't that they were evil and wanted to keep the deposit; it's that they were incompetent and didn't know what they were doing.

2017-2018: Assumpció Gich Planella

Rent: £650 a month

Deposit withheld: €264 for 'damages', including €100 for a door handle that was already broken when we moved in

Of all the landlords I've had, the worst was Assumpció Gich Planella.

Things started off okay. She seemed nice at first.

But little did I know that did was just a facade all landlords use to gain your trust and extract more money from you.

After one year of living there, she kicked us out (even though we had a baby) because she wanted to move in herself.

She started renovations while we were still living there. She was planning on getting a new bathroom, probably paid for with our rent money.

After we moved out, she didn't return our deposit. We kept sending her messages and emails asking when we would get our deposit back, but she never replied. She was ghosting us. She never picked up her phone when we called her. She didn't respond to WhatsApp messages either (even though we could see from the green tick that she had seen the message).

Now, every month we had lived there, we had paid our rent in full, and on time. We had given her over €10,000 in rent. We were perfect tenants. Then when it came for her to return the favour, to do her part and return our deposit to us, she mysteriously went silent.

We found out she had been supposed to give our deposit to a government agency for safekeeping. Of course, she didn't do this. She had kept our deposit in her bank account and probably spent it.

We hired a lawyer, who wrote a letter to her threatening legal action. She immediately emailed us saying that she'd pay the deposit back right away.

But even then, she kept some of the deposit for 'damages'. This included:

• €100 for a broken door handle. Even though the handle was broken when we moved in. We even have proof of this; it's in a document where we listed all the broken things when we moved in. A document that the landlord herself signed.

• 24 euro for a new dishwasher filter (even though we'd only lived there one year and dishwasher filters last five years)
• 100 euros for repainting the bedroom
• 40 euros for cleaning the balcony.

Time taken to return the deposit: Five months. Fuck you, Assumpció Gich Planella!

2018-2021: Girona

Rent: €1,300 a month

Deposit withheld: None

Shortly after moving in, a door handle broke, and then an expensive toilet seat. I emailed the landlord asking if he could come to fix them. The letting agency replied instead, telling me to leave the landlord alone and that it was my responsibility to pay for repairs. This was the same letting agency I paid €960 to for helping us to arrange the lease.

It was around this time I started fantasising about throwing a brick through the window of the letting agency. A nice, solid brick. First I'd toss the brick up and down in my hand a few times to test the weight. Then I'd pull my arm back, bring my arm whipping forward, and let the brick go. For a moment, the brick would hang in the air. Then the brick would hit the window and there'd be a SMASH as all the glass would splinters into a million pieces. Years of anger released in one moment, a symbolic act of revenge against every landlord in the world.

Unfortunately, the law doesn't allow people to smash the windows of letting agencies. Instead, I had to keep my rage pent up inside, as every tenant must.

The next thing that happened was three days before my son's second birthday, the electric shutters in the living room would no longer go up or down. The slats were worn from age and needed replacing. It wasn't our fault the shutters broke but we had to pay the full cost of replacing them: €800. We basically bought the landlord new shutters.

We never heard from the landlord. He was strangely silent. He might as well not have existed if it wasn't for the fact we were transferring €825 into his bank account every month by direct deposit. He didn't ask us how we were during the COVID epidemic. He didn't offer any condolences when my girlfriend's dad died. However, he did take the time to increase the rent by an extra €4.50 a month after our first year, as is his right in the tenancy agreement.

Conclusion

Fuck all landlords. I hope they all die slow, painful deaths.