I have lived at Meadowood for four and a half years now. When we first arrived, I wasn't impressed. It felt like moving into a Motel 6.

- The kitchen was dinky with very basic appliances.
- There were no lights installed in the bedrooms or the living room.
- The toilet and bath tub were plastic and had a distinctive "doll house" feel.
- The carpet was a dingy brown color that promised to prominently showcase every spill as a vibrant stain.

I seriously spilled some Fiji water in the hallway about a year ago and I can still see a faint outline of where the spill occurred.

Some things were even worse about this place than living at a Motel 6! Our assigned parking space was at the very end of a long line, so we could get closer to the house by getting a guest parking spot... meanwhile the one right in front of our house was unoccupied for the entire duration of our stay here.

Also, we have pets and the privacy wall around the patio has a gap beneath it large enough for a great dane to wiggle his way under if he wants to. Let alone a small dog and a cat.

The air conditioner barely works and rattles when it runs, and the energy it consumes gives us a constant bill of $500 in the summer.

Still... there were quite a few bonuses to living here:

- The grounds are beautiful and have lovely strolling lanes.

- The pools are well-maintained and lifesavers during the summer.

- The pantry in the kitchen is a helpful feature.

I can't really think of much else, because so much stuff was broken when we moved in. The screen door on the patio popped right off the track the first time we tried to move it. The maintenance guy said it would never work right because the doors they stock don't fit the tracks.

The hanging bar in our walk-in closet fell from the wall when we had half-filled it with clothes. The maintenance guy couldn't fix it because the wall was too torn up from previous attempts to mount the bar that had been spackled over before we moved in.

The bathtub and toilet stained easily, even with frequent cleaning.

The garbage disposal never worked.

And the screens in our windows weren't properly attached to the frames when we moved in. This became apparent on a windy day when they spontaneously curled up against the single pane windows.

Our patio was cracked in half.

But despite all this, I was enjoying living in Meadowood. It was a nice peaceful community, and despite all the talk of crime and horror stories about this area, we were never bothered. Not once. I never even found anyone who smoked pot... and believe me, I tried.

I endured all the drawbacks without complaint, focusing instead on what I liked about living in Meadowood for quite some time... even after they started shutting off the water about three times a week.

Until one fateful day... they spontaneously raised our rent by $100 a month.

Sorry, but if you're raising my rent, I expect you to build me an extra room. WTF is this about'

From there, things got progressively worse. The complex changed management and owners like 8 times since I've been here. Now I can't even park in my crappy assigned spot because they're painting the covered metal awning.

Why' I don't know. Probably so they can raise the rent again.

My rent on my 700 and something square foot apartment is currently $920 a month.

For the same price, I recently found a beautiful 2 bed 2 bath 980 square foot apartment in Bristol Bay with a built-in washer and dryer (instead of the crappy washing room with tiny washers and driers that cost like $5 per use and only accept ghetto meadowood debit cards rather than cash), an ice-maker in the freezer (woo hoo! No more buying glacier ice and lugging it home during the summer only to have it melt so it'll refreeze into a brick forcing me to use a chisel just to dislodge a few cubes.)

I will be moving out of Meadowood next month and into the new Bristol Bay place where I'm hopeful everything will be much nicer. Judging from what I've seen so far, Bristol Bay is the best complex in the Reno-Sparks area for pet owners on a rent budget of less than $1000 per month.

To be fair though, you could do a lot worse than Meadowood. Despite its many, many flaws... it isn't a terrible place to live. But why would you want to settle for such mediocrity' While there are worse places out there, there are certainly better places as well.

Unless something about Meadowood's location REALLY appeals to you... I'd advise passing this place by.

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