Apartment Review for La Jolla View - La Jolla, CA

Where to begin: Well lets start with one week after we move in the kitchen sink springs a leak the apartments maintenance man comes over to fix the leak. He finds that the overflow for the dishwasher was not screwed on properly and said that was the problem. Two days later there is a pool of water in the kitchen again only this time it has reached the dining room floor. He comes back and finds that the dishwasher hoses were not sited properly. He cleans up as best he can calls the carpet guy who comes over and cleans the dining room floor. A week later there is water in the walk-in closet. Call the maintenance man yet again. His short lived investigation meaning he walks in looks at the floor walks into the bathroom looks around without moving anything or touching anything and says that it must have been the overflow on the tub. His fix for this problem is to bondo it. Cover the overflow completely with a sealant that when hardens is like concrete. The carpet guy comes over yet again cleans the walk-in closet. At this point I start to notice other things wrong with the apartment. Like when we clean the bathroom sink and tub the get dirtier not cleaner. Some sort of white covering comes off showing a filth they tried to cover up. The door had a ½ in gap between the door jam and the actual door to where when you closed the door you could see light all the way down the door and under it. The refrigerator doors have gabs in the top corners leaking cool air. The tiles in the bathtub have cracks to where you can see the wall not to mention they are not put in correctly so several of them have corners sticking out. There is a patch of ceiling above the tub that looked like someone had cut it out and patched it very very poorly. Dry wall tape sticking out. Ect…ect… this problem I was told when I moved in would be fixed still was not. Month 2 my wife and I have our first baby little Evylane Dawn my north star. About month 4 I heard what sounded like a mouse under the sink. And sure enough there was not one but two mice in our apartment. Told the management the maintenance guy comes over with a 4 traps . Which the mice ignored it was like they knew what they were. At about 6 months our upstairs neighbors move right after they move roaches appear in our bathroom. Call the management maintenance guy comes he puts boric acid in one cabinet and says that should take care of the problem. It doesn’t I call the management again and on top of roaches in the bathroom we now had ants in the kitchen. They are coming through cracks in the tiles and from under the sink. I must have killed hundreds of thousands of them. Maintenance guy comes over gives us a can of ant and roach pray, sprays a little himself and walks out says it is done. by this point I had called the management 8 times for the front door which I had the management come over and check themselves. So they could see I was not making stuff up. 6 times for the refrigerator doors. Which still are not fixed correctly to this day. All they had to do was get a new refrigerator in there. 7 times about roaches which they said they could not do anything more about unless they moved us. Which they did not even suggest. Until the mold issue which I will get to. 9 times about the ants in the kitchen. Which they still have not properly closeted off the kitchen or even tried to do. 4 times for the tile in the tub which he tried to do 3 times before he got it to kind of seal. 3 times for the poorly patched hole above the tub. 2 times about water in the kitchen. 1 time for water in the walk-in closet. By the 6th month I had had enough of the maintenance guy not doing a proper job the first time he comes over. I ask Marisa if I can do the stuff myself. She points out in my lease where it states that the management has to do all maintenance on the unit. In month 7 the new upstairs neighbor falls asleep with his tub running. On a weekend of course. Water starts pouring out of the heat light in my ceiling. I mean allot of it. I run up stairs pound on the door no answer. Go back down stairs turn off the circuit breakers for the bathroom. Run back up stairs pound on the door again the neighbor answers in a daze will not let me in says nothing is wrong. I tell him water is coming from his place to mine. He closes the door on me. Go down stairs call the management she come over 25 mins later. By this time I had taken 7 to 8 gallons of water off my floor; and tried my best to dry the heat light area. She goes up stairs finds out that the tub had over flowed so much it had soaked the hall way carpet. Comes back down and says that she will have someone come by first thing Monday morning. She did not consider it to be that big of a problem. I do the best I can to clean as much water as I could up. However seeing how much water came down I knew that there was problems in my ceiling still. Monday comes maintenance guy comes in says there is not much he can do; by this point I am beyond mad. I call management and demand that they at least look up in the ceiling. They do go up through the poorly patched hole. And find the insulation was soaked. They pull down a 3 foot long strip of it and seal the ceiling back up. That is all they do for that. In the end of month 7 a new supervisory manager for the management team comes to the complex. Says he understands all the problems we have been having and wants to take care of everything all at once. So I give him a list of things that the maintenance guy had not fixed or was still not fixed properly. And for the most part he got things done. Mostly they had to come in a second time to reseal the tiles in the tub and the kitchen. And the refrigerator was never replaced and the doors never re-hung properly so the gap is still there. The new front door is warped so it has trouble closing. Beginning of month 9 at this point my wife is pregnant with our second baby. (3 months pregnant). And she is in nesting mode. So she starts a spring cleaning of the house. She gets to the walk-in closet that we have been using as a storage area for shoes and clothes we were not wearing; plus her bags she was not using you know purses and such. Anyway she asks me to come look at something and in the back of the walk-in closet there was a two section all the way across the walk-in that had mold a ½ in thick and it was on clothes and on bags and shoes. And the carpet in the back of the walk-in closet is soaked I call the management immediately of course it is a Sunday so what do I hear well it is not an emergency situation so I can have the maintenance guy there tomorrow morning. I hung the phone up and started to clean I pulled the carpet up and the padding after I cleaned both put most everything that got mold on it in garbage bags and threw them out in the trash. Made sure my pregnant wife and 7 month old daughter is in the living room while I am doing this. I save a couple of pieces of stuff with mold on it to show the maintenance guy. Monday morning comes and goes the maintenance guy comes over says there is no problem because I had cleaned it up the day before. I had did his job for him. He gets a drill and drills 12 holes about 1/8 in in the base of the back wall in the walk-in closet. And that is it. They had a carpet cleaner come in to do the carpet even he said that it smelled in the walk-in closet like a mold factory. On Monday I ask management to first to please give me a copy of all the maintenance done on the apartment since we have been in it, and to please put my wife and daughter up somewhere till they can find out where the mold came from. I was told they could not authorize that. Only John the new supervising manager could. They called he did not show up until Wednesday walked into the apartment took 2 pictures one of the tub the other of the back of the walk-in closet. I was at work at the time but my wife was there. We had been camping out in the living room since Sunday. I had shut the bedroom door as well as the walk-in closet door. See we live in a one bedroom apartment so we had the babies crib next to the walk-in closet door. And after finding the mold there was no way. No way I was going to have my baby by that any longer. I am not even sure how long it had been there, because we had been using it mainly for storage. Wednesday, I call the manager Janise she tells me that they have done what they can and that was it. Thursday: I call the supervising manager and have a talk with him the first thing I ask him for is a copy of all the maintenance done on the apartment since we have lived in it. HE told me he could give me a copy of our lease agreement and that was it. Second question I asked was why he wasn’t putting my family in a motel let alone a hotel. And why wasn’t he going to pay for the items damaged by the mold. And why weren’t they taking this more seriously and investigating where the water that caused the mold had come from. He told me they were not even sure there is mold in the walls or under the tub or water anywhere else. He told me that they had done their very best for me and my family and to prove it yet again he was going to allow us to move to another apartment a few doors down that would be ready to move into on Tuesday of the following week. So his solution to my immediate needs were to make me and my family wait in the apartment for another 5 days and move us to another apartment He told me that it was not his responsibility to pay for the damaged items or to have the rest of the clothes in the walk-in closet cleaned. After talking with him for about an hour he said and I quote “ Mr Fowler we have done our best and you must consider your options. Option 1 move into the new apartment on Tuesday, option 2 stay where you are and live with it, option 3 we release you from your lease and you move out. First of all he never before that moment said anything about us getting out of our lease and moving. Second stay where we are and live with it. Those words I will always remember. I had called a friend that day and he was mad at me for not calling him earlier in the week. He told me to get my family to his place immediately. Which I did!!!!! And on Tuesday of the following week We found a new place to move to. But since my wife is pregnant I am not allowing her anywhere near the old place. So she cannot help me pack up stuff or move. I have a few friends helping me which is good. But I still cannot believe that all of this was done at an apartment complex one block from the UTC mall in La Jolla. I know that when I leave the apartment they are going to go in there and do things right like take the wall out dry it out. Maybe look under the tub. Or replace it because it needs replacing. But something in the back of my head tells me they are going to operate the same way they are now unless someone says enough is enough. And that is what I am trying to do now. No one should have to ask their landlord to do the right thing when it comes to mold or water issues. Or ask for 4 months to have a front door that does not fit to be replaced. And I know no one should have to ask for 3 months to have a roach and ant problem to be handled correctly. I want the list of maintenance issues on the place since we lived in it. I want them to give me my deposit my last month’s rent for all the work I did doing their job. I want them to pay for all the items I had to throw away. Some irreplaceable!!!!! I want them to pay for the cleaning of all the clothing that was in that walk-in closet. And most of all I want them to do the right thing s from now on. I want them to apologize to my pregnant wife and my 7 month old daughter for not taking care of things properly.