When my friend and I were showed the apartment, everything looked wonderful. It was large, had a balcony, and 2 bedrooms. We were shown a different apartment than what we were going to be moving into, this was our fault that we didn't inquire to see the one we would be signing the lease for. We were told that the people who lived there were very clean, and the apartment had the same layout as the one we had seen. Being naive first time renters, we figured this was good enough.

WRONG! When we moved in, we had cockroaches everywhere. We kept a daily count of how many we killed. 45 was the record. It took management about a week to come in and fumigate the place. Until then, we were paying out of our pocket for roach bombs and spray. The lady who showed us the apartment ended up getting fired for reasons unknown, and lied to us about the previous tenants. Apparently, the previous tenants were extremely dirty and never took their garbage out.

Besides cockroaches crawling on my friend and I during the night, there were various other terrors that made it difficult to sleep. A lady next door to us had some wild kids, and would let them run around at all hours of the night. Occasionally, she would throw stuff at the wall to quiet her own kids down, and come over to try and borrow my cell phone to make calls. There would be all kinds of parties going on, keeping you up, if her kids didn't do the trick.

After parties, we would play a game the next morning called "What's on the Stairs'" There would be various "presents" left on the stairs from party goers. Some of my favourites were: 2 pieces of pizza that were left out until they started growing mold, someone who puked up what looked like chicken noodle soup with undigested carrots, pee in a Pepsi bottle, and regular pee on the ground.

The next part of the game would be "How Long Until This Gets Cleaned Up'" Even though I lived there, I was not about to touch some dude / girl's pee-filled Pepsi bottle. I would tiptoe up the stairs trying to avoid the presents in order to get to my apartment. By the way, the chicken noodle puke remained there for almost a week.

Some other tenants who lived downstairs also agreed that the hallways were their trashcans, because they would clip their toenails there. Of course it wouldn't get cleaned up, and you always had to wear socks / shoes / protective gear when walking around. You always felt dirty no matter how many times you showered, and were constantly reminded of filth when a cockroach would scurry away when you turned on the light.

Adding more, the heat would go off and on for no reason. Sometimes it would be unbearably hot, and you had to sleep with the windows open in the dead of winter. Later, it would be so cold, I went back home to my parent's house so I wouldn't die of hypothermia. There was never a middle, it was one extreme or the other.

The girls in the office who worked there were not very helpful if you needed a question answered. The maintenance people would take about a week to even look at your problem. Luckily, we didn't have too many things to get fixed. I guess that's good, right'

In conclusion, I learned a few things from this scary experience:

1. Make sure you see the apartment you are going to lease, not one that is similar.
2. Look at websites like this to get an idea of places that are good and bad.
3. Ask if the place has ever had cockroaches, and make sure they're being straight with you. (I asked at this one place, and the guy said it was taken care of... just then one ran across the floor- he denied it was a cockroach, we were out after that.) Believe it or not, some places in Ypsilanti / Ann Arbor never have, and those would be my top picks.
4. Lastly, ask about your neighbors. Are they families with wild kids' Are the party goers' Grad students' Most of the time people will be honest with you and let you know who their renters are.

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