Suck 1: A few weeks ago my parents' landlord decided to exercise his right to be an asshole, so I now owe him $500 a month for every month that we are here (starting September), on top of the non-refundable pet deposit and the $350 for the additional pet insurance (for Basie, the 15 pound non-shedding miniature poodle whose biggest issue is bad breath).
Suck 2: When I went to get out the winter clothes from the storage locker a few weeks ago, I discovered our things were covered in mold. From being in the storage locker for two months.
There was lots of arguing with Public Storage, there were calls to the corporate office, there were threats, there were tears. There were statements that they had "never had mold before." There were unsuccessful attempts to find the source. There were calls to the insurance company, but we learned that the insurance that you're required to have with the storage locker (and which is our only insurance since we no longer own a home, et al) only has a $250 rider for mold, with a $100 deductible.
My final come to Jesus with Public Storage was them giving me a climate-controlled unit (which we did not have before) for the same monthly rate as we were currently paying, and the disposal of all of our things that I deemed non-salvagable. Do you know how much it costs to junk furniture when you are not currently under contract with a waste management company? A lot.
Fine.
So I hired a moving company to move my things from one storage locker to another. I discovered which residential cleaning companies will clean mold off of things other than walls, and that leather cannot be sanitized. I settled on ServiceMaster. I slowly came to accept the fact that we were going to be throwing away our leather couch.
What, you'd keep this? No, the picture is orientated correctly. The couch was living on its side. This was the instigator; back when everything was wedged in together and this was all I could see.
So today was moving day. I was horrified about what we might uncover when we finally emptied the unit, but tried to ignore it. The movers were supposed to come between 8:30 and 9. I didn't leave my parents house until almost 8:10, so I figured I had no time for coffee on the way. Halfway there I realized I forgot my cell phone.
I sat in the parking lot, waiting. By 8:50 I knew that if I had stopped for coffee, they would have been there at 8:30, and since I didn't, they were going to be late. I went to a neighboring business and asked to use their phone so I could call my mother and have her bring my phone in case the movers or the cleaners called.
At 9:10 they showed up ... in a (very) late-model Buick. I thought they might have come in a truck, but understood why they didn't because they wouldn't need one for this job. I drove into the facility with them behind me and made a wrong turn, despite having visited the storage locker almost weekly recently.
While they got started loading our boxes onto hand carts, I went over to the other building to open up the door to the new unit. Except my new security code didn't open the goddamn climate-controlled building door. And the office dude wasn't due to arrive for another 10 minutes.
Luckily for me there was someone else inside that building, and while I'm pretty sure I scared two years off of her life, I used her exit as my entrance.
They started moving the stuff. I asked them to place anything with mold on it aside in the hallway. Pretty much anything that wasn't a box had mold on it.
As we got further and further into the locker, the larger my gag reflex became. It was as if there were spiders crawling over everything. One of the movers tried to make me feel better by telling me the story of how this morning one of his sons found a live mouse in their dishwasher, and how it's still on the loose in their house somewhere. Gross! Mold is gross too, though.
Originally the cleaning guy was going to steam clean the mattresses. This is what we found on the ground under the mattresses:
I want to barf again just looking at this. And God only knows what that brown shit growing on the wall is. I decided to scrap the mattresses.
I DID have him clean Bug's chair (the large, beautiful glider/recliner), despite its mold freckles, because that thing was SO DAMN EXPENSIVE and it has sentimental value. I'm not going to show you a photo of it, lest you think I'm a horrible mother and I should have thrown it away.
They also cleaned our kitchen table:
Don't worry, this is the "before" picture.
Also salvaged (cleaned) were the dressers, an additional table, the mini rocking chair and the adult-sized rocking chair.
I don't even want to know what was in the chemical cleaning solution, I just loved the way it smelled. It smelled "clean" which just means it smelled like familiar harsh cleaning chemicals. I wanted to jump in the bucket.
At the end of it all, the following items were hauled away by two of the CREEPIEST junk collector guys I have EVER MET (not that I meet a lot of junk collector guys; just creepiest guys in general):
- One queen-size mattress and box spring
- One full-size mattress and box spring
- Two cream-colored arm chairs (I will spare you those photos. Did you know that mold can grow orange and six inches straight in the air???)
- One patio table
- One shoe organizer (seriously, I know that THAT wasn't wood; mold grows on fake shit, too?)
- One side table
- One six shelf plastic organizer (apparently it does grow on plastic)
- One microwave
- One BRIO train table that we had inherited from the neighbors
- One office chair that was never all that comfortable anyway
Umm, so basically all of our goddamn furniture, save for our dressers, which I wouldn't have been so sad to replace anyway.
I gave the movers a $100 tip because I felt so horrible that they had to deal with so much moldy grossness. So the total move bill plus the bill for the cleaning totaled over $600. And we have to buy all new furniture. And still pay rent at Public Storage. And at my parents.
So when I was done, ignoring how the new storage unit that was the same size as our old storage unit was only half as full, I went for a run in the 30 mph wind and then got a pedicure.
So if I talked to you today or drove by you today or cut you off today while yelling "F*CK OFF, ASSHOLE!!!" you might know why.
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