I can’t believe I’m still talking about this.

As many of you know, my apartment flooded on February 14th. (See previous blog post here http://almstreet.blogspot.com/2009/02/great-flood-of-2009.html) It was a complete mess, headache, and inconvenience while it got cleaned up. The good news was that the water did not damage my furniture. It got wet, but it seemed to dry out fine. The bad news is that my furniture was damaged by the people that run my apartment complex.

The day that it flooded, the apartment management moved my furniture to a dry, empty apartment down the hallway, where it sat for a week while my apartment was being repaired. When my place was ready to be moved back into, they moved the furniture in. Between moving the furniture in and out, they completely destroyed my TV cabinet.

I cannot tell you how angry I am about this. While my furniture is not super expensive, it is valuable to me, and I take very good care of it. To have them treat it so poorly and for them to have such disregard for it is infuriating. They put two huge scratches down the side, chipped a corner off, broke the middle support leg off and made many other dings and scratches to the cabinet. Before they moved it, the cabinet was in like-new condition. None of the damage it has now was there before they touched it.

What is even more irritating about this situation is that I had just moved in six weeks prior to the flood. In moving, I had to hire a moving company. My moving company was awesome and literally did not put one scratch on any of my furniture. My movers were able to move all of my furniture across town without damaging it, and the apartment complex couldn’t even move it down the hallway without completely trashing it.

After a couple of months of trying to settle this, I have now received an answer on reimbursement. Since it wasn’t damaged by water, my insurance company won’t pay for it. Therefore, I have requested that my apartment complex reimburse me for the damage. The amount they have offered is $200, which does not even come close to the amount I paid for it. Like I said, the cabinet was in like-new condition and was only a few years old. The $200 dollars does not sufficiently cover the cost, but that is their final offer. I am getting screwed.
All I can do now is to warn anyone in Atlanta to think twice before moving into Mariposa Loft Apartments in Inman Park. The flood that happened in my apartment is a known problem. The dishwasher line “popped” off and they KNOW that all of the dishwasher lines need to be replaced in all of the apartments. The apartment manager actually told me this. She also said that they have not “gotten around” to doing that yet. Too bad for me that it happened in my apartment before the dishwasher line was replaced.