The new place...

I moved into the new place on Thursday. I guess the obsessive side of me took over because I found it next to impossible to go to bed with boxes stacked everywhere, so I stayed up until 4am, but I got everything unpacked and situated to my satisfaction.

However, when I went to go put things in the walk-in closet I opened the door and the closet wreaked. It smelled like a boys locker room. I got some cleaner and wiped down all of the little shelves, and even got some spots off the walls. The floor is a mess because the vacuum cleaner is broken (I need to take a closer look at it, because my suspicion is that it just needs a new belt.), but I was relatively certain that the odor was not emanating from the carpet. Cleaning the shelves seemed to help, but did not entirely eliminate the odor. So, I opened the bedroom window to air things out and burned a scented candle in there for a while. After an hour or so it seemed fine, and by the next morning I felt pretty confident that the odor is gone.

Anyhow, I was still a bit mystified as to how and why that closet smelled so bad in the first place. Friday morning I text messaged the girl who moved out to ask if she'd left behind a card for the laundry. She texted me back "No, I didn't do any laundry. Sorry." She had told me that she lived there for 6 months (although it turns out she was really only there for 2), and I cannot fathom how someone could go for more than a couple of weeks without doing any laundry. I don't know anyone that owns enough underwear to get away with even more than 3 weeks. So I figured that explained the smell in the closet. I was pretty disgusted. I asked one of the roommates where I could get a laundry card, since the other girl apparently didn't have one. She confirmed that the former roommate never washed her clothes, and that they always smelled, and in fact her whole room smelled like that. (I went to look at the place while I had a cold, which must explain why I hadn't noticed.) I was officially grossed out right there.

Friday I transported my food over from the old house, and despite the fact that there are only three of us living there right now (two other girls moving in later this week) the fridge was so full of food that I could barely cram a few items in. So last night I attempted to brt a little with one of the new roommates. When I felt like I was in good I approached the issue of cleanliness in our home, starting with the fridge. I just told her that I thought we should clean it out, since I'm certain a lot of that food was abandoned by the girls moving out. She agreed, and immediately launched into this explanation about how clean the house used to be, and then the girl I'm replacing moved in and apparently everything went downhill from there.

She also said that the other girl refused to purchase toliet paper, so eventually everyone squirreled away their supply in an attempt to force her to go buy some. Instead she went a week without using any. At that point some of the roommates couldn't take living with her anymore and started leaving, and one of the replacement girls (who was also driven out of the house inside of a month), oblivious to the tp standoff went out and bought a bunch to stock the bathroom. All I could think was 2 months of not washing clothes, and not using toilet paper...no wonder my closet smelled. I'm surprised the odor wasn't stronger.

The garage is full of random junk that apparently belongs to this former resident, she has stuff striddled throughout the house. I told my new roommate that I was going to talk to that girl when I saw her at church, and tell her to come over and pick up her stuff or I'd have to throw it away, but she wasn't there. The new roommate confirmed that this girl also did not attend church and added "the bottle of alcohol in the paper bag in the freezer is hers." I opened the freezer, and sure enough, there was a bottle of frozen vodka. That went straight in the trash. The new roommate looked a little uncertain about whether or not I should be junking it until I reminded her that if the other girl had wanted it, she should have taken it with her, because we are not a storage facility. I sent the other girl a text message this morning telling her she has until Thursday to come get whatever she doesn't want winding up in the dumpster. (I haven't heard back.) The new roommate is pretty enthused about the plan to just start junking stuff and get things cleaned out. I am more thankful than I can say that I replaced this girl, and didn't end up moving in with her.