After living at Timberwood Crossing for a year and recently moving out, I must say that I have regretted living here from the day I moved in. I noticed a theme in the other reviews; many of them mention the same problems. However, it seems quite strange to me that the few positive reviews all seem to be lumped together. My guess is that people that work in the office submitted the positive reviews to try to bring up the average.
First, let me talk a little about the positive things about this apartment. The thing that I liked most about this apartment was the location. It is very conveniently located near everything in Portage. Parks, grocery stores, shopping malls, and restaurants are literally walking distance. This apartment also is one of the few that allows pets. In fact, that is one of the main reasons I decided move to this apartment. The other apartments that I looked at were either out of my price range, did not allow a cat, or I did not like the location. This pretty much sums of the positive aspects of this place.
Now let s get into the negative aspects of this apartment. First of all, my apartment smelled terrible. The smell is hard to describe in words, but just imagine gorilla vomit and you will get the idea. In fact, you will spend all the money you save on rent buying products to help hide the awful smell. Additionally, the carpet in my apartment looked terrible and needed replacement badly. It was badly stained where it had been soiled by animal droppings and who knows what else. The carpet was coming up on the edges of every room and appeared to have no padding left under it all. I can not count how many times I tripped on the seam of carpet walking out of the kitchen.
My appliances were equally terrible. They were very old, outdated antiques from the 70 s. The dish washer frequently resulted in the dishes looking worse than they did before they were washed. The refrigerator was no better. The temperature control was broken so every thing in it would freeze after being in there for a few days. It frequently leaked water all over the kitchen floor too.
The AC and Furnace never worked right either. Even with the AC running full blast, I could never get the temp lower than 80 degrees in the summer. Likewise, I could never get the temp warmer than 62-63 degrees in the winter. I lost count of how many times I reported these problems. However, they were still never fixed right. Sure a maintenance guy would show up with duct tape and pretend to fix them, but that was about it. Also, it always would take multiple follow-up calls before a maintenance guy would actually show up. Eventually, I got sick of dealing with it and just gave up.
Many of the people at this apartment are really creepy too. The normally people that move here, usually don t stay very long. Shortly after moving in, the police raided the apartment across the hall from me in the middle of the night. Eventually, I got use to seeing the police hanging around all the time. I also got accustomed to seeing bums dumpster diving. Another problem is the teenage and 20 something kids hanging out in the parking lot every night being loud and obnoxious. I can t count how many times I ve been awakened to them yelling at each or and just plain talking too loud in the parking lot at 2:00 - 3:00 in the moring. Likewise, you frequently hear car music in the parking lot thumping.
The lawn and grass at this apartment is easily the worst I ve ever seen. It s obvious that maintenance does zero landscaping. The grass always looks disgusting; you won t dare walk through it. And that s probably a good thing because you would probably step in dog crap because people don t clean up after their dogs at this place. People also throw trash on the ground. It s pretty normal to see McDonald s bags and Burger King cups laying in the grass. Maintenance makes no attempt to clean it up either; they just mow over it making a worse mess.
It is also normal to see cars broke down the parking lot. People leaving their trash outside there door is also huge problem. One of my neighbors put an old CRT monitor outside of his door. It sat there for 2 weeks. Finally, I said something to a maintenance guy. It sat there another 2 weeks after I informed the maintenance guy. I finally got so sick of looking at it that I took it to the dumpster myself. Speaking of dumpsters, they are always full at this place. Every other apartment I have lived at has a dumpster at every building, but not this place. All the dumpsters are located next to each other on the same side of the complex. In my case this meant a long walk. The mailboxes were also inconveniently in the same area also. This did not seem like a major problem at first, but the longer I lived there, the more this became an issue.
This place also does not have washers and dryers in the apartment. They do have a laundry facility, though. However, the laundry room in my building was pretty scary. It kind of reminded me of the boiler room where Freddy Kruger hangs out. Of the 2 dryers in my building s laundry room, only one worked well. The other one would not dry a load in one cycle. It gets pretty expensive running the same load through the dryer 2-3 times. So if someone else was using the good dryer, you are screwed.
I heard others mention the pool was never opened. In my case, the pool was opened as advertised from Memorial Day until Labor Day. However, all the red necks and gangster wannabes hanging out there made this experience really uncomfortable.
The playground is pretty pathetic too. The swings are always broken. The equipment is rusted and old. The ground always seems to be muddy. Not a place I would want a kid of mine playing at. Likewise, the tennis court is also pretty run-down. During the year I lived in this dump, not once have I seen anyone actually playing tennis.
The water at this place is terrible too. When taking a shower, it comes out so hard it feels like you re being sprayed with a fire hose. It literally takes about 5 minutes to get warm too. Don t even think about drinking it.
In conclusion, this apartment is a depressing, run down, poorly managed armpit. One of the best experiences of my life was finally leaving this dump. My recommendation is to find another apartment. Avoid this place like the plague. Even if you have to pay more money to stay somewhere else, its money well spent.

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 05/21/2009
we should have read this before living here.

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