silverfish & silverlinings.
If you’re seeing this, I’m still alive and kicking. If you’re seeing this and I owe you a response, that’s coming after May 1st. Scouts honor. 🫡
If you’ve ever moved, plan to move, been sick and didn’t know why, or are just in for some interesting tales that may help you at a later date, keep reading. If not, all good. This is my free form of therapy. 😅
October 2023
Moving on up
Mark and I upgraded to a 2/2 townhome (TH) in October 2023. We were so thrilled for the extra space, a private driveway for Gronk the Bronc(o), and garage for yoga times. However, shortly after moving in I got super sick with a sinus infection. Then Mark.
February 2024
Sick of being sick
Fast forward, we were sick on and off for 5 months following and didn’t know why.
Monday February 19: On President’s Day, the weather had just changed from being wicked cold, to brisk and sunny. I ran around the house opening all the windows thinking fresh air could do our sick some good. To my surprise, each and every single window was covered in black mold and spores. 🤮
I typically do a window cleaning once a quarter because I am mild-OCD with this sort of stuff, but since we just moved in October (it had a supposed “turn” cleaning), it had been cold, and we were not opening windows, I didn’t even think to pull up the blinds and check. 🤦🏼♀️
I spent 8 hours on the holiday cleaning with 2 bottles of bleach, 6 paper towel rolls, and 1 tile/grout scrubber. I could not go to sleep knowing we were surrounded by mold.
Enjoy this super stellar moment Mark captured for me. The original video this is snapped from is just me swearing LOL.
Tuesday February 20: After sharing this alarming information with the leasing office over the holiday, the next day one of the maintenance guys came over with 1 paper towel role and a spray bottle. I laughed and said I already did it and that would not have been enough. He couldn’t believe the photos vs how cleaned up it was now.
Tuesday February 27: Another week went by until a mold expert came out. We needed to know if the quality of our air was OK as mold could also be hidden behind walls that are unseen to us. He said he needed to give our complex a quote on next steps and that I should run dehumidifiers upstairs and downstairs, in addition to purchasing Benefect disinfectant (kills mold, but people and animal safe! Order it if you get a mold pop-up.).
Thursday February 29: 2 days later, leasing brought over 2 industrial dehumidifiers. Our TH was 70% humidity when plugged in. For reference, the average home should be 30-50%. We had to run these 24 hours a day, dump the gallons of water it captured 2x/day, just to maintain the high end of 48-50% humidity. This implied to us moisture was not going to stop entering our apartment no matter how low we ran our AC or how long we kept these suckers plugged in. Our electric bill was going to be obscene. To top it all off, we found silverfish in our apartment. Silverfish are not harmful, but if there’s one, there’s plenty more. That was the breaking point. GTFO, y’all.
In the midst of all of this, we were given permission to break our lease with a 30 day notice until a solution was found. Leasing offered to come do an air duct cleaning prior to conducting air quality testing. We wanted the reverse in the case that construction had to be done to remove any mold, that the air ducts would be cleaned after the dust storm. We were denied. We were also denied any reimbursement of the provided health bills, cleaning supplies, or surplus on excess electric usage due to the dehumidifiers. 🫠
So I started packing. Thankfully due to my flexibility with work (& with any of you reading that have been trying to get in touch with me since this all started), I began the thing I was good at in another lifetime and began packing things in waves.
📌 – if there’s interest, I will write a step by step moving article since I’ve done this 18+ times in my life from watching my parents as a child, to my mom as a badass newly single mom, to myself post-college all over SF, LA, and now St. Pete. If you want it, holler. I’m happy to outline it in a much better fashion than this therapy session you’re reading.
First things to get packed are those items that are decorative and you don’t need on a daily basis. That was picture frames. Get this – each and every photo I took off the wall had rusted nails. MOISTURE problem, friends. I was rocked, but vindicated. I left the nails in the walls during our move as my constant reminder to get out and move on. I then chose to leave them in the wall after turning in the keys so that Management could see for themselves. Don’t worry, we had a zero-balance bill at move out! 😉
Mark and I spent the next 2 weeks hunting for a rental in the area. After seeing over 15+ apartment complexes and a few Single Family Homes (SFHs) & THs, we selected an apartment complex that we didn’t even have on our list — total drive-by find and in an area that’s super convenient to the beaches, our favorite places, downtown St. Pete, and Tampa. Plus it was close to a Wawa! (IYKYK!).
We signed the lease to move in March 15th. It checked all our boxes except for garage/dedicated parking but after a few night time drive bys, we decided it wouldn’t be an issue for Gronk. The complex was built in 2020, the end unit had concrete block exterior (wood interior, which I’ll get to shortly), double pane windows (which made my heart sing after spending 8 hours cleaning mold off crappy old windows and muttons!), tall ceilings, gorgeous grey vinyl wood plank floors, and all new energy efficient appliances. Coming from our TH in the other community our electric bill was higher than average being an end unit with older appliances (we’re 72/73º AC people), this was exciting to us.
Best part, it was a 3/2 meaning now we had a dedicated guest room and separate office for Mark. But lucky for y’all I still choose to sit at my cutie set up in the dining room. Being in a dedicated room gives me the ick. I love being able to move around the house (or post up on our big wrap around screened porch) as I wish.
March 2024
Part 1 // Navigating the new
Friday March 15: I picked up the keys mid-day to start bringing over some of the valuables/delicate items that we’d rather move ourselves. After taking the first round of items into the new apartment, I heard running down the hall above our unit and then their front door slam. My heart dropped. Coming from a concrete block TH where we never heard anything made this quite the jarring experience.
I sucked it up and figured this was my chance to meet the upstairs neighbor. Maybe we’d be friends (?!) LOL. I too ran outside and caught him in the hallway as he was coming down the stairs. “Hey! I’m Ashley. My husband Mark and I are moving in below you tomorrow. Wanted to let you know that if it’s loud, that’s why.” OH THE IRONY. He tall like Mark, dressed for the gym, had a nice brief conversation, and then he took off. Cool. Met the neighbor. Check!
Saturday March 16: The movers came and loaded our TH and we headed over to the new apartment. From the moment they finished unloading around 2PM until AFTER midnight that evening, an absolute CIRCUS ensued upstairs. Bangs, drops that sounded like hand weights, and runs (but no voices) all occurred. We sat and shook our heads in disbelief. Was this a fluke? But all I could do was cry from pure exhaustion.
To summarize the issue before fully diving into the last 4 weeks, here’s a calendar of noise I kept until April 4th (when I finally gave up). This has been ongoing for almost a month alongside the back and forth with the new Management/complex.
*names removed to “protect” the innocent (but oh so guilty). 🙄
Monday March 18: We promptly spoke with the Management company regarding our immediate move-in concern and how it happened the entire weekend.
Beyond them being obnoxious, remember when I said the exterior was concrete block but the interior was wood, above? Welp, the construction team likely didn’t lay down the padding required to prevent excess noise between each floor. Huge flaw. It’s as if we live in the same house.
Knowing our floorplan is the same as theirs, we put two and two together that it was KIDS running. Those short, staccato, heavy footed steps. Hey, nothing against kids (it’s been an active topic for us lately 🥰), but we needed answers as to why this was happening if these buildings were new.
At one point, we even googled options for soundproofing tiles for our ceiling. But due to my husband having a background in music production, those installs were expensive and wouldn’t prevent the “knocks” from above.
Management reached out to the family that same day and reported back to us later that they were defensive at first but then quickly apologized that they had just gotten back from a vacation, were doing laundry, and getting back to normal life. Management also introduced their new favorite saying – “this is apartment living.” This phrase has continually been thrown at us since day dot.
As a resolve, Management then suggested we have a Dr. Phil-style meet up to meet face to face with our neighbors to discuss our concerns. We thought about approaching them without involving Management like mature adults, but were unsure on their temperament (hey, I only met the husband 1 time for maybe 30 seconds), so we agreed to this style of meet up.
Friday March 22: We met with the husband only in the clubhouse (the wife continues to hide yet is the largest offender being home solo all day doing gosh knows what) and naturally he got defensive since it was seen as 2 vs. 1. Mark and I just sat there calmly wanting to find a resolve.
We learned he is an ER doctor who has alternating schedules, 2 daughters (6 and 12), and a stay at home wife who’s maybe 80lbs (did I tell you she loves to walk around in heels? LOL). They’ve lived all over but most recently from NY. They had a HUGE house (his inflection, not mine) and property prior so the apartment life is new to them. We left the meeting feeling semi-hopeful that this has just been a time of transition for them and that it would get better.
Sunday March 24: Just 2 days later, we heard the sound of high heels clanking the floor all over the house at 10:45PM and then bangs and throws above our bedroom (still no voices) until 5AM. I was furious. Here we are, dying from exhaustion of poor sleep the last week since moving in, trying to get over this mold crap, yet the upstairs couple is having a special bedroom event. I left them a note early that morning and we received this text in return. 🙃
As if that red circle above didn’t make me want to punch a hole through the ceiling.
📌 – Health Check: we started feeling better, just a little over 1 week being removed from the mold! #win
Friday March 29th, my birthday a couple days later, we had the most epic sound extravaganza. My mom had just come to town the day prior (will explain in the next section) and she was floored by what was going on. At one point it sounded like the kids were diving into the floorboards above her guest room and we’re going to land in her bed.
📌 – if you’re wondering, no we still had not unpacked. The only thing we unpacked at this stage were essentials and I did 12 loads of laundry (yes, 12!) to ensure all the mold was rid from all our clothing. Mold spores don’t just die, so we had to ensure anything that was cloth was cleaned in its entirety. We also had our washer leak twice and dishwasher not wash. Just adding salt to injury. Thankfully, the washer has now been replaced to uber brand new (maintenance visit #3) and the dishwasher guts replaced (maintenance visit #4).
March 2024
Part 2 // Just keep swimming
So where do we go with all this? Ha. Here’s the thing friends… due to fair housing laws, as long as the family is not intentionally blasting loud music or hosting a party during quiet hours of 10PM-8AM (per the county), there’s not a single thing that can be done. No legal notice. No eviction. No nothing. “It’s apartment living.” The lesson here… if you don’t want to live with sound disturbances around the clock, you gotta shoot for a top-floor apartment/condo, concrete block TH, or SFH. Period.
Here were our options laid out by Management:
Any new resident can put in a 30 day notice within the first 45 days without facing lease termination fees ($6,150 in our case).
Take that policy above & Management would give us an extra 30 day extension due to our issue. Ie: give notice on April 29 and have 60 days to find something, but doing so means we risk being homeless if we don’t find something as our unit goes on the website/market.
Wait for a top-floor unit to open here.
Option 1 became the goal. Find a freaking top floor apartment/condo, TH, or SFH before April 29th.
But here was the caveat, Mark and I have Cali trips planned April 15th through the end of the month. And for personal reasons, we can’t move our trip back. So we had less than 30 days to leverage the 45 day policy.
March 18 - March 27: Mark and I went back to our previous list and called every single apartment complex we visited looking for a top floor unit. With no luck in that department, every day from 8AM to 3PM I scoured the Zillow-type sites for options, following up through the dumb automated AI systems, investigating the agents, finding their emails and cells, and making appointments.
4PM onward, Mark and I would go view the homes either by self-tour (a nightmare system of hoops you typically have to pay for) or with an agent. At night after I went to bed, Mark would play my lead BDR (business development rep) and send me new listings to reach out to the next morning. We continued this cycle every day.
We saw 30+ homes during these ~2 weeks. None of them would work.
If you’re not familiar with the St. Petersburg/Tampa area, the homes were mostly built in the 50’s and 60’s. The ceilings are 7-8ft tall (unless you find a newer build gem). Mark is 6’6’ so he’d find himself ducking through some doorways and step downs and I would find myself (5’8”) palming the kitchen ceiling. Or the ceiling fans we’d both run right into walking from one room to the next. It was so claustrophobic. Not to mention that 9/10 times, the photos NEVER looked like the actual unit once inside. They were disgusting and not well maintained. Photoshop is one hell of a drug.
March 28 - April 4: It wasn’t until my mom (a licensed FL Realtor for 19 years) came down to help (& to celebrate my 35th birthday!), that we finally had the ah-ha moment.
We needed to avoid what she coined “button homes” (the 50’s-80’s builds littered everywhere) and only focus on visiting 90’s buildings onward with 9ft standard ceilings. Otherwise we were going to keep running, pun intended, into properties that we’re not a fit.
This narrowed down a few key areas: Safety Harbor (where we want to hopefully buy a home next year), NE Clearwater, parts of Dunedin, or Oldsmar. Everything south of that would be a rare find, and from our boots on the ground experience, those were gorgeous new construction homes on scandalous streets.
With this, a TH popped up in NE Clearwater area. We will call this Stony Brook. To sum it up, we were a part of a scam/ethics nightmare with just normal everyday people, but FL licensed realtors themselves!
Here’s the letter I sent to FREC (Florida Real Estate Commission), and now plan to send to NAR (National Association of Realtors) next as it’s more an ethics concern:
This message is to inform the FREC board that there are 2 agents that are utilizing deceiving and deceptive marketing practices by leveraging an address they personally own as being for rent and reposting it in both the MLS and various other rental websites, in what appears to be a scheme to capture new leads for the intent to covert prospective tenants into house buyers. My husband and I are searching for a new rental. My mom who is a licensed FL realtor for over 19 years drove 4 hours down from St. Augustine to St. Pete to help us. We wanted to proceed with ADDRESS. We viewed the unit twice via Showingtime app. After our first viewing on 4/2 via Showingtime app, AGENT NAME, the listing agent (HIS LICENSE # & BROKERAGE) had his wife and fellow agent, AGENT WIFE reach out to my mother. And then to myself. During our first interaction via call, AGENT WIFE verbally shared that there was an additional $310 HOA fee that the tenant would be responsible for monthly, and in addition to the rent posted online. This was disclosed after the fact and NOT present on the listing then, nor is it now. PDF from today is attached. Our second call on 4/3 was regarding questions about the unit prior to scheduling a second showing. Even with this non-disclosed $310 fee being a red flag, we viewed the unit for a second time on 4/3. That same evening, we spoke with AGENT WIFE the 3rd time @ 8:08PM for 12 minutes (see photo) and asked to have an application sent to us before they left for their travels back to Houston, TX. They assured us they would send it, but never did. We called, emailed, and texted them on 4/4. Finally we got a call later in the afternoon from AGENT NAME himself claiming that they had chosen to move forward with another applicant (and we had still never received an application). AGENT NAME told us he would have his AGENT WIFE reach out to local homes for sale in the area and see if any would be interested in renting to us. I played along as I suspected their deception (see text message from AGENT NAME 4/5 & AGENT WIFE 4/8). Over 3 days later, the listing remained online. Per the rules, it should have been removed as of now and it is considered a deceptive marketing tool. I reported it to Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com Today is 4/10 and they just reposted the listing as “new.” We are more than qualified financially, pay higher than average rent now (& their listing), no background check issues, and have stellar credit scores. We are alerting FREC of this as it can not happen to other couples/families who are searching for a new home with them, or any other agents practicing in this manner. I am unsure how many other properties they are doing this with, but given that ADDRESS is owned by them directly makes this unprofessionalism even worse. We’ve seen other agents admit to using vacant homes to lure in potential customers and try to convert them to a buyer. I suspect the same is happening with AGENT NAME & AGENT WIFE given our experience and documentation.
Once the Stony Brook TH was removed from the equation, we were back to square one. And after a week of being together, my mom had to get back home to St. Augustine, FL.
During her time with us, we viewed 53 TH and SFH. 53 in a span of 1 week! I kept track of the rental listings in a Google Sheet so we could remember what areas were good/safe and which neighborhoods/communities had newer built homes for ceiling-sake – now for renting and for future home buying.
❤️ Mom, thanks for being MVP. Sorry for being the most impatient and bratty 35 year old during this experience. Your support, love, and expertise is invaluable. I love you so much and can’t wait til our next hang so we can do absolutely nothing stressful! ❤️
April 2024
Game time
Friday April 5: a new listing popped up. Another TH in the Clearwater area close to Safety Harbor. We’ll call this one Sebring. Ironically, it’s 10 minutes walking / 2 mins driving to where my father lives (haven't seen him since I was in high school). Of course this would be the case right? Nothing was shocking me at this point.
But knowing the situation we’re in, knowing that we have a deadline, and knowing that this newer TH community looked like a winner online, we made an appointment with the property Management company. Lucky for us, we were the first to see the unit on that Friday and the agent Sharon (a total doll who I left a 5 star google review for) promised us she would not show the home to anyone until we told her “we’re out.” Bless her. She got to hear our whole story to this point and was dedicated to helping us.
Monday April 8: We scheduled a follow up to view/measure and were then going to make a final decision. Should have known better than anything labeled “final” in design-land – that’s always a big joke to the designer.
The TH option was beautiful, but not an apples to apples scenario. Yes, we’d be escaping the noise (only having one wall of neighbors) and getting a garage for yoga times back, but the house was on top of the community pool (hellllloooo summer and kids yelling while we’re trying to work), and the patio on the back had no privacy/screen/plants so you’d be on display facing the entrance of the community and pool at all times.
The showers were narrower than the standard (dumb construction move!) so I was googling shower rod options that bumped out, but due to the wall placement, we couldn’t drill those types in either. It felt like a whole new world of claustrophobia. Plus, we’d have to buy a new couch since ours wouldn’t fit correctly in the space. The “solves” plus the moving expenses (the 3rd time since October) were starting to add up.
Despite our “issues” we applied that evening. It’s all we had at this point. We felt like we were backed into a corner due to this 45 day policy (30 days in our case due to travels). We went to bed not feeling right.
Tuesday April 9: Woke up the next morning also still feeling off about it. Then we got the acceptance letter to move forward.
They say the universe works in mysterious ways, the system was having issues so we were not able to pay the security deposit and sign the lease. I used this time to ride back up one more time to see it. Maybe I’d feel better about the steps we were taking to resolve this?
I got home. Threw my purse on the counter and looked at Mark. He knew, I knew, we couldn’t move forward with a rental that could have similar issues.
I emailed Sharon that although we paid the app fees and we’re accepted, we couldn’t pay the security deposit or sign the lease. I asked her what I could do for her since she was the best person we interacted with. She said if she got a google review with her name, her boss would buy her lunch. I said consider it done!
Then we texted our families the update:
After this text, I went into some of the boxes and began unpacking things to make this feel more like a home. Gosh darnit, if I’m paying to live here, I need to feel like I live here. Things that didn’t require nails and hanging, are slowly being put out.
Thursday April 11: We got an email from Management here that a top-floor was opening in August. YES! But after getting excited and calling them to discuss, we then learned it was $300+/mo more than our current, and we just upgraded $550+/mo when moving to escape the mold TH. So $850/mo more? FUN RIGHT? It was also right next to the basketball courts. I’ll let your mind wander.
So knowing we’d still be “stuck” here through the summer when the kids are home from school upstairs whether staying or signing for the top-floor August unit, we chose to make the most mature decision.
So WTF are Mark and I doing from here?
We’re staying put. Sometimes choosing nothing is the best choice.
We’re choosing to create our peace. We’ve now figured out the main times of banging above us (before school starts, 3:30ish when they get home, and 7PM for dinner). And as if we’re on Aston Kutcher’s Punk’d, they’ve been pretty quiet up there the last couple of days. 🤞
We’re choosing to not settle and are now empowered to know which areas are best for us – Gronk has the miles to prove it. By far the best silver lining!
We’re choosing to go on our trip to Cali because we freaking need it.
I’m choosing to move forward with my business and stop putting all my potential collaborators on hold.
I’m choosing to get back in the saddle 110% with my current clients and will continue to thank them for their patience and support with my wonky schedule the past 2 months.
I’m choosing to be back and ready for my normal life to resume even in nothing around me is “normal.”
If this didn’t send me over the edge, nothing will. LFG! 👊
To choosing resilience,
-Ashley