Yes... It happened AGAIN...

Every 5 minutes I hit the refresh button of my browser. Logged in to Vancouver’s Craigslist ‘apts/housing for rent’ section, with critical info entered into the ‘search for’ field, I waited patiently for JUST the right living conditions to appear on my screen… painfully this situation didn’t appear for 2 weeks! 2 weeks of skimming through fake scam advertisements and misleading posts… overpriced basement suites and useless property management firms that never emptied their voice mailboxes. Finally something within the highest range of our budget had come up. I sent off the critical first contact email…

Hello there Scott,
In regards to the 4 bedroom house located at 55th ave. between Fraser and Main St.... we are interested in viewing the house if we could?
We are a hardworking professional couple looking to for a 3 bedroom rental home in Vancouver. We have decided to move as our current home has become questionably safe, and the street we live on has become extremely noisy over the last few years. (right on Knight Street) We are looking for a quieter place to call home!
We are looking to move for May 1st or 15th or earlier if need be. We have references upon request.
Thank you for your time, Dalyn (day-lynn) and Zoltan
604-722-6xx1 anytime
(I attached the perfect picture of zol and I as well. I find this helps…)

I received an email shortly thereafter and zol took the phone call from a ‘Scott’ later that evening. (my hubby’s a PRO at this kind of conversation!) The overwhelming response to the placed add, had Scott in a tailspin. He certainly didn’t want to interview all of the applicants. We learned from the phone call that he was doing for his landlord what we had done for ours after the fiasco of Dawn Barton - taking over the job of the landlord due to his severe language barrier and finding decent tenants him. Though we’d yet to see the house, we felt good about our prospects just based on the 10 minute phone call. We could view the house in 2 days. I of course, immediately started packing…

Wellllll… it was PERFECT! Very rough around the edges, but nothing paint, a few throw rugs and all of our cool stuff couldn’t cover up. A tad far from where we’d have preferred to be, the house was situated in ‘Little India’, but worth the drive. The house was huge, had tons of storage, a massive deck and a ‘very sweet Filipino family’ that lived in the suite below. After a painful week of waiting for Scott to give us a call, he finally did saying that we’d had the place right off the bat – he just forgot to tell us… leaving me amongst newspaper, boxes and mental agony for 7 days. After realizing I was pregnant he really thought the place was best for us, that and the fact that we enjoyed fixing our home up and were use to dealing with a non-English speaking landlord. That weekend we met the landlord, shook hands and the place was ours.

I can’t really explain the scope of what it’s like for us to move. My husbands 40 plus years of collecting a very WIDE scope of things has left us with an amazing collection of items, rendering our home a museum of the 1950’s 60’s and 70’s. Packing it all up and moving it safely to another location requires skill, dedication and a close friend that has no idea of what he’s gotten himself into till its too late. When asked if he’d mind ‘helping us move’ that Friday… poor poor sweet Jess had no idea what he was in for. His day was spent with my husband emptying a storage garage we had decided to give up and also the contents of our previous house into a 2 ton truck... it only took 3 trips to get not quite everything! The day was long and hard… and running on a muffin and bottle of water Jess of course became confused when my husband said, “I use to have a TV collection…” upon lifting the 10th vintage television set into the truck. “So how many does it take to make a collection?” he later asked me… “Eleven?”

While unloading the truck at our new abode, the downstairs tenant Eddie and his friend started to help us take the boxes up to our patio. Our landlord was there and helped as well. We were uncomfortable with the assistance, (more-so embarrassed at the amount of stuff we had) but after saying “NO need to help!!” 5 times we just gave in and let them lug away. An hour later the deck was full and we thanked the unwelcomed help. Later that evening as I was unpacking the kitchen, my husband came in with a distraught look on his face. From the rafters of the garage he’d managed to knock down some sort of ‘pipe’ fashioned from a coke can. “It had all these little holes poked on top…!” “Oh sweety, it’s probably just for weed!” he then pulled from his pocket a tiny tiny zip-lock baggy and I could tell straight away it hadn’t been used for the ‘green stuff’. “oh…. hmm”. This discovery coupled with the brief conversation with the old coot next door earlier that day… “Oh God, you’re not moving into THAT house ARE YOU?” our high-winded spirits began their agonizing float to the ground. Could this all really be happening to us AGAIN we asked ourselves?

Within the next month we began to notice things we hadn’t in the excitement of moving in and claiming the new place as ours… like say, the sketchy looking white girl that was always hanging around, violently freaking out on Eddie everyday at around 1pm before his kids came home from school... The homeless man that banged on my back door looking for Eddie... The police that came looking for a fugitive they believed was hiding out downstairs… The ‘transactions’ that happened right outside my kitchen window in plain view involving fists full of cash and little baggies with white pebbles in them… The man sleeping in our garage at 2pm… (who'd obviously been eating take-out, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes right next to our highly flamible antiques we had stored in there...)
Or say the massive pile of expensive bicycles in the backyard? Some were just remnants of their former selves, a frame with a deflated wheel, or a wheel with missing spokes… a bike would show up one morning and be gone by the next, curious… waking up to a repeated BANG BANG BANG one morning we looked out our upper window to see ‘Eddie’ smashing a lock off of a new bike. “oh” we realized… now we get it. Our backyard was a bloody chop-shop…

Don’t ask me how, but I know what crack smoke smells like. It floated up from the basement suite with full force one afternoon – the air thick with its sticky, choking sweetness. I immediately drew my hand to my belly, wondering what damage our unborn child would possibly procure from the fumes. Opening all of the windows, I sat down and thought about our new situation. What the heck was going on!?? The people before us HAD to have known what was going on downstairs, there was no way around NOT knowing unless you were legally BLIND and couldn’t smell. Trust me, there’s just NO WAY the smell of crack can be confused with a Filipino curry. Why would Scott have done this to us? My husband and I discussed our unfortunate situation at length and decided that taking action was far worse than dealing with it. We had learnt this from our previous experience and never wanted to go through that again. Though they were crack dealers and bike thieves’ - at least this time the downstairs tenants were quiet and polite. With a blind eye to the chop shop and plugged air ducts for the crack smoke, we had decided to wait this storm out… oh and what a storm it would be... to be continued…