WITHOUT A HOME

Sometimes life does not go according to plan. It comes at us unexpected and somehow we have to work around the difficulties and make the best out of a seemingly impossible situation. When the kids came to spend 30 days of summer with me on Friday evening, little did I know that we would not be spending it as I had envisioned.

They met me at a building at the apartment complex which was not ours. After work, I spent almost two hours before they arrived moving as much as I could out of our old apartment and into the guest apartment where we had been granted permission to stay for a week until another solution was worked out. An apartment with no internet access which meant I would still have to be exposed to the harmful mold eight hours a day at the old apartment.

In addition to moving the essential items, I was looking at three other apartments to where we could relocate but no 3 bedroom units were available. After the children arrived, we went to look at the units together so that they could decide where we should move. Though we had decided on one unit on Friday night, I noticed the following morning that the top floor apartment of the one we wanted would be available later in the week. It was a 2 bedroom unit but the larger one with the beautiful island kitchen. As we walked around the apartment, we knew it would be a difficult transition but hopefully we can make it work at least for a while until we come up with another solution.

The challenges of the past few days were many, to add to the fact that we are still in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. I spent Saturday moving the furniture I could move by myself into another garage that management gave me the day before. The exhaustion was overwhelming and my body was sore but I knew I had to keep going. On Sunday, I moved a few more items but I soon realised that there was no way that I could possibly move the contents of the apartment into a garage and then again to another unit. So, I spent the rest of the day at the guest apartment with the kids.

The snowball first started when I noticed spots of mold underneath my son’s mattress on Thursday night as I was making his bed and then gained momentum on Friday morning when I went into the coat closet to get my running shoes for a run before work. A run which never took place as I scrambled to take items into my first garage which was already quite full. My son’s down jacket was covered in gray spots of mold.

All of this made sense when I put it together. The issue really started weeks ago when I noticed grey spots on my Persian rug in the master bedroom closet. For a long time I thought it was dust. Since my vacuum is broken, I couldn’t clean it up so I left it and paid it no attention as I didn’t venture into my closet too often. This would also account for my laboured breathing at times and headaches. Again, I didn’t think too much of it until the mold started spreading throughout the entire apartment. As if the mold issue wasn’t enough, we had to deal with the lingering stench of the mildew from last year when the upstairs neighbour’s air conditioning unit was leaking which ended up flooding the front area of my apartment.

When the maintenance guys came inside the apartment to inspect the mold on Friday morning, they tried placing the blame on my not having the AC running 24/7 which they claimed was the cause of the mold growth. I even told them that the upstairs neighbour had another leak the night before but they seemed to have been set on the fact that my not being educated in running the air conditioning unit was the problem. Later, when I went outside to inspect the wall which would have been the outside of my closet, I noticed water dripping down the side of the building. According to the upstairs neighbour, there was a similar mold outbreak 4 years ago when all of the residents of building 8 were evacuated until the repairs were completed.

All the while, I wondered why me and why now. I have had more than my share of life’s challenges to last me several lifetimes. Perhaps somewhere amidst all of these difficulties, there is a silver lining.

As it stands this evening, the management has informed me that I need to vacate the guest apartment by Friday morning which basically means we are without a home.