Sooo..... now that I am "sorta back" I can fill you in on a task that is taking up almost all of my time - home renovations!!!
My husband and I are currently "renting"... something I swore I would never do.
It's been quite a different experience from owning your own place, and renting/living in someone elses. Our biggest dillmena? What do we fix? What will our land lord cover? Is it worth fixing if it's not ours? Etc ....
It's soo much different than back "home". Here we rented a place with A/C - does it work? No. We tell our landlord and they swear it worked 5 months ago.... Well I'm telling you it doesnt', and we hired and paid someone to tell us it didn't. Now what? How long will we have to wait to have it replaced?
Better yet, we have termites. We tell the landlord and he tells us " oh yeah, we know". Okay??? Well, not my problem....
They tell us they had someone clean the place? I DON'T THINK SO!!! Unless you hired someone with absolutely no standards...then I call bullshit. The place was filthy, and disgusting. The stove should have been replaced as it was sooo rusty, but we had our muchacha cleaning it for 2 days with a special product that eats rust.
Okay, well I won't complain too much. I didn't take any before and after photos, but I will take some tomorrow as we plan to paint and add some much needed colour. Hubby wants yellow, and I want a nice dark orange. Tacky? Only if it's flourescent!! LOL!!!
Well...hubby and I are off to Home Depot to get the paint and osme plants for our "superman". We like to call our carpenter "superman" as there isn't anything he can't do. He's our electrician, security man, carpenter, painter, etc... What can't the guy do??
Off we go, and nos vemos pronto!!! With photos, I promise!!!
5 comments:
I have the same issues! I've always rented here, since I'm just now earning enough to save up to buy a house/apartment. Still, apparently Cancun standards and American standards aren't the same! I have to pay much more than I'd like for something that would be cheap in the States. Oh, well.
I'm always tempted to replace windows and floors (I've seen some ugly floors!), but it's really not worth it, is it?
Now my dilemma is that I want to rent something cheap (AKA UGLY) so I can save up to buy my own place in a few years. *sigh*
At least you got a stove. Most places to rent in Cancun have naked kitchens.
Saludos!
Gringation - OMG, well first of all, congrats on a job after graduation!! Second, yes the standards are COMPLETELY different. We are still going to try and get at least half of the costs taken off our rent, but we'll see if that happens... I'm hoping!!!
Soooo not worth it when it's not your own. We were at home depot last night and had to buy a new faucet for our shower. We were tempted to replace all the faucets in the house...then remembered it's not ours, so why!!??!!
Gringation - Good luck saving up...may mean less visits to Starbucks, but will be worth it!! LOL!
Yes, lucky, but honestly would have preferred having to buy a stove and taken it after we left. This is not a gas stove. It's electric and built in, so if we were to replace it would be useless to us in a year!!!! When I say dirty... I mean DIRTY. We have to replace all the knobs, and our muchacha honestly spent hours cleaning it with a special cleanser..... :(
We have rented since we moved here and usually the landlords do nothing, they always ask if my husband can just fix it. Just keep anything you change and when you move put the old (yes broken) ones back on. Its their problem they didnt help you out. We have a nice shower head that I had bought while living int he states and we just remove the old one and like I said when we move we put it back on. Good luck.
Amanda - Looks like we will be renting for a while as well! Damn swine flu was horrible on us last year!! thank you SO much for that advice. It's sad that we have to resort to these things, but well worth it. I told hubby that I wanted to take all of the stuff with us when we left...he agreed 100%!!
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