When duplex living goes wrong

Living in a duplex has its obvious ups and downs. You have the spaciousness and freedom of living in a house, possibly your own yard, only one jointed neighbor, security, etc. But with the freedom comes a cost.

You pay all the utility bills, have one really close neighbor that you must get along with, landlords and possibly shared spaces and bills, noise, yard-chore division, upkeep of the property and more.

A good neighbor and an attentive landlord are imperative to the pursuit of duplex happiness.

In my situation, these two key aspects are absent. My neighbor is a passive-aggressive pothead and my landlord is what one might term a “slumlord.”

To deliver this story fully I feel it is necessary to give some background about both the neighbor and landlord separately.

The neighbor: John

John is your typical stoner. He is generally friendly and nice unless you catch him on a day when the stash has run low. He grows his own organic garden and is a connoisseur of all things psychedelic.
He is a sports photographer by trade and gets only a few gigs a year that support his frugal and carefree lifestyle. He is an avid snowboarder and outdoorsman.

The slumlady: Agnes

Agnes is our landlady. She is a wealthy 89-year-old widow who acquired an abundance of properties after her late second husband’s death.

She feuds constantly with her stepdaughter and brags unceasingly about her two biological daughters. Set in her ways, Agnes is a devout Catholic who runs her properties through righteous manipulation and miserliness.

Our house in Southwest

The duplex my roommate and I moved into is an old Portland-style house that has illegally been converted into a duplex. There is an upstairs apartment where John lives and the downstairs where we live.

The yard is shared, and both John and I have dogs that don’t get along. The bills are shared, as well, and divvied up based on how many people live in the entire house.

I heard about the apartment from a co-worker who was the previous tenant. It was an awesome deal—no first and last rent, no deposit, pets OK and no problem that we were first-time student renters.

We were told that the landlady was hands-off and the neighbor was agreeable. The landlady approved our applications during the first interview and we signed our informal rental agreement.

From there we figured it was going to be an ideal living situation for any student. Boy, were we wrong.

From day one we had numerous petty problems with both our slumlady and John.

The majority of the problems with Agnes are based on her refusal to spend a dime on her properties unless it is an exigent situation.

Moving into the house, the carpets had not been cleaned in seven years and had gone through three tenants, the walls were dirty and the house was a mess—there were even bird feces on doors and the floor throughout the house—and the kitchen cabinets were painted a banana-yellow with grey walls. It was a disaster.

Despite the obvious need for cleaning and upkeep, the landlady vehemently refused to pay for any of it. Needless to say, the house got cleaned and painted without the financial support of the slumlady. We have gone though broken toilets and sinks and a plethora of maintenance problems that we have had to solve ourselves.

That sums up just some of the financial problems we have had with Agnes. Others include random visits, entrance into our house without our knowledge and threatening eviction for no apparent reason.

With John we have other problems. Between his 5 a.m. morning routine of mowing the lawn and 3 a.m. sex sessions with his girlfriend, we deal with bill-paying problems and passive-aggressive confrontations at all hours of the day. Even though walls separate us, it is very important to have a duplex neighbor that you get along with.