apartment

Your First Stalker: The Unexpected costs of a single incident

Erica, Free

One of the incidents that took me away from this blog last year was my very first stalker. While the incident in question was brief and quickly resolved, the stress and trauma lingered. Before I begin, I would like to clarify that this is for illustrative purposes only and is based solely on one young woman’s experience with a creepy neighbor leaving a weird note on her car. This is absolutely not meant to judge anyone else’s reaction to a similar situation. We all do what we must do you feel safe. This is also not meant as an invitation for advice or consolation. I have already received plenty. Anymore, especially from strangers on the Internet, would be unwelcome and extremely overwhelming.

The cost in time:

  • One hour spent frantically calling your parents asking what they would do. A note on your car is just over the line enough that you are spiraling into terrifying and dangerous possibilities. You can hear the fear in their voices too. They are 1200 miles away and cannot protect you as they feel compelled to do.
  • One night spent quietly alone in your apartment not lost but exchanged for a night of getting drunk with the friends who were kind enough to let you stay over on such short notice.
  • One morning lost to the hangover.
  • One hour of working on your ongoing issues in therapy lost to this new and terrifying situation. And asking a mental health professional how to deal with a crazy person (crazy person is not the word you use. In therapy you say “potentially dangerous” and “unstable”)
  • One hour of your afternoon of your Saturday afternoon lost to filing the police report. Crying in the police station because you did not expect the officer to be so understanding.
  • Two hours on a weekday evening pricing out doorbell cameras home alarm systems and privacy film for the windows.
  • Half an hour installing doorbell cam
  • Two hours installing alarm system
  • Four hours installing window films on all windows

Monetary cost

  • $200 doorbell cameras for front and back doors
  • $250 (on a 30% off promotion) for home security system
  • $30 a month optional monitoring for security system. Who knows how many months you will feel this is necessary?
  • $150 for privacy window film. Most important for windows the directly face your neighbor’s apartment. You want nice ones that you will enjoy looking at. You don’t want your house to feel like a prison. You’ve done nothing wrong, after all.

So there you have it. Six hundred dollars up-front and an ongoing cost of $30 a month and over 24 hours of my precious time lost to some piece of shit who at best thinks he is entitled to my attention and at worst has taken the first step down a path to putting me in physical danger.

I have not had any issues with my neighbor since the incident, but I think it is important to talk about these kinds of things so that people know they are not alone and should never be made to feel unsafe.

-Erica

Reversal of Fortune: When the Tenant Haunts the Ghost

Carolyn, Free

I was so sad to see Erica go. Of course, I cannot blame her. The space was getting too small and, I too, remember the frustrations of not having my own thermostat. She does think of me often, as do Ella and Jane, and I get a warm fuzzy feeling inside that I wish could cancel out the grating annoyances of the new tenant.

I want to preface this by saying nothing the new tenant does is wrong. We are just wrong for each other. The best thing to do in this kind of situation would be to simply admit the wrongness, and part ways before for any resentment or animosity grows. Unfortunately, we do not have that option. And two years is a long time to be stuck with the wrong person.

So with that mutual understanding between us, please allow me to vent just for a moment, about Bridget.

She is the most oblivious person I can imagine. I could write my name every day in the dusting of makeup on the sink and she would never even look. Of course, that would be too frightening for a first introduction, but she would never notice anything more subtle.

She is very loud. She is either play music, watching television, or on the phone entire time but she is home. Were we able to establish communication, I doubt I would be able to get a word in edgewise.

She likes the exact kind of books that I hate.

And so I spend hours and hours and hours watching her scroll through her phone and it is slowly but surely driving me insane. The worst part is, she cannot even delight in the misery she causes me. She has no idea.

-Carolyn

Past Project Reflection: A New Plant Home

Erica, Free

I barely mentioned the process of redoing one of my birdcages in my last post,  but both of them ended up requiring quite a bit of work. The first one was more straightforward. As I discussed last time, I sanded it down and repaint it. The second one did not require any painting, but I wanted to cut a hole in the bottom so that my lemon tree could grow up into the birdcage. This required help from a friend with power tools.

I repainted my first birdcage while still deep in the throes of a DIY blog addiction. This was my first DIY project, and I became immediately acquainted with the very unglamorous side DIY. I wanted what all the bloggers had, a light airy workspace and impressive array of power tools. But they had the benefit of being firmly established bloggers with sponsorships and, often, a second household income.

I laid out my dirty camping tarp in my dingy parking spot and got to work. At this point, I did not have any power tools. There’s no outlet near my parking spot. I took off the door of the base is by hand, which was not hard, and sanded the entire thing down by hand, which was. I primed the whole thing one night after work, trying my best not to get any dirt or cobwebs mixed in with the paint. The next night, I painted the whole thing green. A second coat went on in the morning, the fixtures were installed later in the left the afternoon. After three days of parking on the street, I was able to move the stand up to my apartment, move my car back into the parking space, and move my plants into their new home.

Eventually, my plant collection began to outgrow the first birdcage. I bought another one, this time with a plastic bottom instead of metal so that I could cut a hole in it and place the lemon tree’s pot below the cage, allowing the tree to grow up into the birdcage. I thought it would be relatively easy. My plan was to heat up a kitchen knife and stab it through the plastic to melt it (I know, a terrible idea). Once I had perforated a full circle, I would just punch out the hole in the bottom of the cage. But the plastic turned out to be much thicker than I expected. I turned to a friend who does have power tools and she brought this Dremel over to try to help me. Even with power tools the process proved to be more difficult than expected. We broke a number of product before we finally succeeded. The result is a bit sloppy but highly functional. No although that original lemon tree house died (RAD) plant collection, like a gas, has expanded to fill the space provided.

My next adventure with these cages was grow lights. The space available for the cages and the layout of my apartment meant that both cages required grow lights. I started with a pair of LED lights that simply did not provide enough light for all the plants in the cages. They were also not particularly attractive, so I looked for an option that was both functional and aesthetically appealing. With very little research, I ordered a string of cafe lights for each cage and several grow light bulbs. I thought this would be a cheaper and less-cluttered look than the number of clamp-on grow lights that I would need for all my plants.

 I was excited to see that the grow light bulbs fit in the string of cafe lights and lit up, but they immediately grew very hot. A few quick texts later to a friend who knows much more about electricity than I do and it was clear I had created a fire hazard.

Thanks to my hubris, only one string of lights was returnable. The other found a home with my sister. She uses them with the intended lightbulbs.

I returned the unopened lights and purchased a set of industrial clamp lights and put the grow lights in those. The end result is that one of my birdcages is at least somewhat like I had originally planned, although with far more wires. But my plants are happy and my cats can’t eat them. That’s all I can really ask.

-Erica

Past Project Reflection: My Thrifted Dresser

Erica, Free

I’ve always loved my little white dresser. I bought it second-hand during my senior year of college to store my ever-expanding wardrobe and to help my bedroom looks less spartan. The paint job wasn’t great. It had been quickly painted with a single coat of white paint that left splotches of the wood showing through. There was a giant splinter coming off the corner of one of the drawers. And a few of the knobs were stripped to the point that they cannot be tightened. But I liked that it was solid wood and the perfect size to provide a decent amount of storage without being obtrusive.

When I moved to my current apartment, white actually went quite well with the color scheme. The paint job was still splotchy and the knobs were still janky, but it actually looked all right. And then I redid my birdcage stand. After months and months of idly scrolling through DIY blogs, dreaming of one day doing a project like that myself, finally did and it was pretty easy. I figured I might as well do it again.

I decided to try something a little more interesting, and settled on a two-color design. I also would use this opportunity to change out the stripped plastic knobs for new metal ones. I picked a shade of blue that I thought went well with the leftover green paint, and dragged the dresser down all three flights of stairs to my parking spot in the basement. After sanding the whole thing down and priming it (a very important step), I painted on all of the green. This included the raised front face of the drawers and a rectangular border along the top. I painted the rest of the dresser blue, including the borders of the drawers, and use painters tape to block off that green rectangle so that it can stay green. This is not turn out perfectly but I deemed it good enough.

The blue did not turn out as deep as maybe I would have liked, and some of the pencil outline of the green rectangle still shows through. It’s definitely not perfect, but it has a little more personality than just a plain white dresser, and now at least all the knobs are fully functional. After my Marie Kondo spree a couple years ago, it graduated from being a clothes dresser to being my substitute linen cabinet, a job which suits it very well.

-Erica

(There are going to be a lot of generic cover images for two reasons. One, I’m playing catch-up and taking actual photos just falls by the wayside. Two, I don’t have any “before” pics because I painted the dresser long before I started this blog)