4 Apartment Issues You'll Probably Call Home About

By Kaitlin Hurtado on May 16, 2017

The idea of living on your own during your college years seems like a dream filled with freedoms at first mention — no parents to dictate where you are or what you’re doing at any given time.

However, as time passes while living on your own, there is always the chance of running into problems that your parents would typically handle if you were back at home. When you experience these problems, you may be at a loss as to how to solve them and you will find yourself reaching for the phone to call home for quick help.

Here are some common apartment issues that you can encounter during your college years.

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A backed-up toilet 

You flush your toilet after doing your thing, not thinking much as you go to open the bathroom door. Instead of the smooth flush you are accustomed to, the toilet gurgles and you chance a glance back at the toilet only to find everything but a clean bowl. Dread fills your stomach as you try flushing again only to get the same result. Hopefully, the extent of your toilet problem is that it just isn’t flushing rather than overflowing onto the bathroom floor.

If you were home, you could easily yell for one of your parents to come and solve the problem before it got out of hand. Because they won’t be in your apartment to help you, you’ll take the next best thing and call them on how to solve the problem while keeping everything sanitary and inside the toilet bowl.

Your parents may remind you that they left a toilet plunger with you and that, yes, this is the exact thing that you would use it for. Put your parents on speaker as they talk you through the process of unclogging your toilet, with yells of telling you to stop being such a wimp pushing you on to a functioning toilet.

Clogged drains in your shower or sink 

You are finally standing in the steaming shower you had been dreaming about all day — from your 8 a.m. lecture to your five-hour shift at work. Halfway into lathering up your hair, you notice your shower is quickly becoming a bath as the water level now reaches your ankles. Even after your shower, the water drains slower than ever.

Those of us with longer hair have the tendency to shed our hair throughout the day, even more so in showers or bathroom sinks as that is where we often tug at our hair to wash it and/or comb it. Bathroom drains are typically clogged by hair over time and a build up of shower products like shampoo.

The easiest to way to solve a clogged drain is to manually get the source of the clogging out — prepare yourself and reach into the drain to remove the culprit. If you don’t want to use your hands, there are tools that will help you complete the job (or a wire hanger will do). To avoid another clogged drain, take preventative measures and buy a hair catcher built to stop hairs from going into your drain.

Problems with your fridge 

A lot can go wrong with your fridge. The door’s seal can stop working, stopping your fridge from properly closing. You can reach for your milk in the morning, only to find it room temperature. Your first reaction may be to freak out, especially if you had just gone on a grocery trip and restocked your fridge.

If you call your parents, they’ll be the voice of reason during your breakdown, coaching you on the steps you should be taking to fix the problem. Depending on where you live, call for maintenance to place a work order to get the problem fixed as soon as possible. In the meantime, try to fix the problem as much as you can in the time that it takes for the work order to actually be attended to.

If you were lucky enough to catch the problem right away, try your best to save the food in your fridge. If you have any ice chests and coolers, put the food you want to prioritize in them, ensuring they stay cool in the time your fridge is down. If you don’t have any coolers, keep your fridge closed as much as possible to avoid letting the fridge’s temperature rise further. Broken seals can be temporarily fixed if you have tape handy — close the fridge doors as tightly as you can and secure them with tape to avoid letting cold air escape.

Pest problems 

If you are lucky, you won’t have run into issues with any rodents and insects in your apartment.

If you or your roommates tend to leave out opened food or leftover crumbs, however, you are bound to experience a problem or two with roaches, ants, or wandering rodents. While you may want to get rid of them quickly and on your own, your best bet can be placing a work order for your apartment to get rid of them efficiently and effectively, especially if it is a recurring problem in your apartment and even the entire complex.

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