Our House

Edit: I just realized that this is the sort of blog post that I probably wouldn't ever be interested in reading if it didn't apply directly to me. So . . . consider this a journal entry/dumping ground for photos of our apartment. You know, for posterity. Read at your own discretion, because it probably won't leave you feeling entertained or inspired about life. Sorry :)


I began drafting this post during the first few weeks after we moved here to Grenada. You see, Jared and I have a love-hate relationship with this apartment/house of ours. Actually, it's more of a neutral-hate relationship. I don't think we've ever really loved it. After our first month here, we began to think of our house in more of a neutral way than a hateful way, so I never hit publish on this post. But now we're back in hate mode (difficult landlady, gas leaks, AC leaks, funny smells, creepy sounds, decaying animals in pipes, broken lights . . . the works), so I don't even feel bad about bashing on this place for a hot second.

Remember how when we first arrived here our house was filthy and reeked of dog? Also, I'm pretty sure someone made drugs here at some point? (We get some weeeird whiffs sometimes.)

Our landlords blamed the dogs for them not being able to come and check on the place before we arrived. Thus the filthiness and smelliness.

Then a few weeks after settling in, as I was being dropped off from Trash TV night, my ride was like, "Hey, you rent this place? I've totally been here before. They had, like, tons of pitbulls."

"Really? So you know the guy who lived here? Was he nice?"

"Ya, actually there were two guys. They were gay."

"Oh, good. Well, I'm glad we got a new mattress then." (sorry for that. but really. the last mattress was bad news bears, and in a third-world country you never know what could be living in an old mattress.)

I've heard that it's actually illegal to live with a gay partner in Grenada--it's an extremely Christian island. We're pretty sure that's why they hoarded pitbulls. Keepin' out the government, yo.

In addition to our home being the ex-home of two non-law-abiding, dog-hoarding, possibly drug-making Grenadians, it also makes weird noises all the time. Nobody lives in the lower floor currently (we had lower-floor neighbors for about a week before they bailed from their contract and found a roomier place) so we're the only ones living in the house, but it sounds like people are walking around on the roof all the time. The house creeks during the day when I'm home alone, and often times it sounds like there's someone living in our fridge, knocking to get out. The walls are paper thin and the roof is tin, so the tropical thunderstorms are terrifying (and also awesome), and the house could probably fall in on us at any moment. We have a second bedroom that we mostly use to store things in, but the door swings open and slams shut of its own accord if I don't pull it extremely tightly closed. It's creepville.

So why did we rent this apartment in the first place? Well, we honestly had to race to get it because so many other people wanted it. The fact is, it's cute. It's not an ugly apartment at all, and when all you have to go off of are a few pictures while apartment hunting from a thousand miles away, you go with the apartment that looks the cutest and comes at a reasonable price. Here, I'll give you a house tour.

I've already posted pictures of the outside of the house before, so I thought I'd highlight the beautiful flowers that line our driveway this time.

We live on the upper floor, so we have a cute little balcony we have to climb up to to get inside. It's dangerous after it rains though--those blue beasts are slippery little monsters! Jared almost died once coming down the stairs.

Our front door. Although all students are "required" to live in a place that has bars on the doors and the windows, we actually feel pretty safe where we live. Good thing too, because the lock on those bars is broken, so they don't really do anything but make it look like we live in a ghetto. Don't worry, our regular front door locks just fine.

Our kitchen. This is the room that sold us on the apartment when we were looking at pictures. Turns out, looks aren't everything. This is my least favorite room, because it's not air conditioned (and gets no breeze), it often smells funny, and most of my time in here is spent scrubbing dishes and scraping food into a grocery bag that serves as our "garbage can" hanging from the drawers. Sorry, no garbage disposals on this third-world island, and definitely no dishwashers. We actually moved our kitchen table into our bedroom so we can eat in comfort.

This is our bathroom. It's tiny, but somehow the shower is actually quite large. My only complaints about this room are that there is no counter space, the shower drain is a super sketchy hole in the ground (typical third-world style), and our landlord hasn't fixed our broken lightbulb, so for the past month we've only been able to shower in the mornings. It's really not too big of a deal though. Oh, except that the shadow of the faucet against the wall at night looks like an alien head. Ya, sometimes I don't brush my teeth at night just because I'm afraid of a creepy shadow.

Our bedroom/living area/dining area. We probably could have rented a studio apartment, because that's pretty much what we've turned this room into. This is our work area, our sleep area, our study area, our safe heaven. Also, I'm a fan of the vaulted ceilings. No worries though, our new apartment next term has vaulted ceilings, too. No loss there.

Another view of our bedroom

This is the guest bedroom. Aka, our storage room. It gets super hot in there during the days, so we leave the windows open all the time. I think the breeze is what makes the door open and close of its own accord though, so maybe we shouldn't have been doing that all term long . . . Also, we found some sketchy droppings in there about a month after we moved in. We never did find out what made the droppings and haven't seen any droppings since, but I really think there might be a decaying rodent in one of our kitchen pipes, because it reeks when we open up the under-the-sink cabinets, but there's nothing in there.

So you see, it's not all that bad. Our biggest complaint isn't the apartment itself--it's our landlords. (A Grenadian woman and her husband . . . but actually they might be British? Ya, we don't actually know what's going on there.) They're nice people, but they're terrible landlords. I'm sure you remember the mishap where we were promised our internet would be set up when we arrived here, but it wasn't, so we had to pay $300 EC to have it installed and then, in typical island fashion, it didn't show up for three weeks. Ew. That was a traumatic time. All alone in a foreign country and no way to communicate with our families or the outside world. 

There were also important things that were promised us in our contract and were never given us, even after we went to our real estate agents and they nagged our landlords. And then there's the issue of the ever-present lake on our bedroom floor. About a month ago, the outlet that our air-conditioning unit in our bedroom is plugged into started sparking up in the middle of the night, and some of Jared's hair was singed off. We had our landlady call a repairman. He fixed the sparking problem, but introduced a dripping problem. We let the AC drip on our floor for a full two days before we knew that it wouldn't be stopping anytime soon. Again we had our landlady call a repairman, but (island fashion), they came, "fixed it up," left, and an hour later the drip was back. This happened four times. It has been a full month now of placing bowls under our AC to catch the drip and mopping up the wet floor with towels. The last time we called our landlady about it, the repairman didn't come at all. I don't know whose fault that is, but we've given up. We're just counting down until Christmas break, and in the meantime, the house could crumble down around us and we wouldn't really care because our contract is up in 20 days. 

Wow, I guess this was kind of a long and unpleasant post. I'm glad I got it out though, so we can remember this time in the future. It's kind of nice to know that, from here on out, our living situations will only go up and up and up. Our next apartment is really homey and the landlord is possibly the nicest and most honest old man that Jared and I have ever met. After a year and a half there, we'll be moving back to the States, where we'll have a dishwasher (I made Jared pinky-promise) and all of our old stuff that is currently furnishing my parents' guest bedroom, including our velvet-tufted, queen-sized bed that I dream about on a nightly basis. It's also nice to know that if we can be happy here (and we really are!) then we can find happiness together anywhere.