DH and I recently moved into a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom townhouse after renting a 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom, 3 level house with patio, backyard, fireplace, vaulted ceilings, and an open floor plan. Sounds divine, doesn’t it? Well, not exactly. That simply what you tell people you went to school with, relatives that never visit, and friends that you would like to envy you – as long as they don’t visit too often.

If they did visit more often, they would see the truth. The vaulted ceiling is a huge waste of energy. No one actually uses the fireplace – even the owner wasn’t sure how it worked, so it’s decorative, but not functional. The hardwood floors were actually that pergo, snap-together garbage that started separating after about the first year. Something else no one bothers to mention – ants. Unfortunately, we’d been in the house less than a month when that problem became apparent. Ewww.

Now that I’ve set the scenic backdrop, I must get to the title: 3 Chimps and an Idiot. The idiot would be the landlord, the chimps – a series of rude, obnoxious, lazy “helpers” that couldn’t tell their knuckles from a door knob. Actually, I think I’m being rather kind. One of them was courteous enough to swear at me in Spanish, thinking that I wouldn’t understand him. I did and I know how to dish it right back at him – in Spanish no less. So in a moment of pure fury I called him something I would rather not put into print, but let’s just imagine that it involved a chicken and his mother sprinkled with a very explicit action. Let’s just say it had him speechless.

Like any good lemon, the problem became apparent once we got used to the place. The white carpets had bright orange KoolAid stains, which we made by the owner’s bratty child. I know, I watched her squirt her juice box all over the carpeting in the upstairs hall and master bedroom during the initial walk-though of the place. The landlord promised to send someone out the next week to clean the carpets. 6 weeks later, fed up and livid – I did the cleaning. It took 6 hours to scrub that crap out.

Like any good lemon, this one had its continual problems, and the stove, garage door, dryer, and railings were just the start. Every major appliance had maintenance called on it at least 2-3 times. I can write a book just on the stove!! It didn’t work more often than it did. Good thing I had a crockpot and the ability of pick up cheap convenience time foods – love boxed pasta side dishes by the way – they totally saved my butt, on more than one occasion.

I remember the pride the Idiot King (landlord) took in how the place looked when we did the walk through. He told how he did the work himself, how it took a year to make the house inhabitable again – and it was only a nine year old house, with one previous owner. The Idiot King even went as far as saying that he’s fired his “assistant” aka the Chimps for being incompetent. Once, in a fit of rage (again, over that evil stove), I asked him when he planned to fire the current chimp because he was astonishingly incompetent. Naturally, it was nearly a month before the repairs were done.

Have you had problems like this? Whether you buy or rent, there’s nothing worse than dealing with – 3 Chimps and an Idiot.