Apartment woes.

AJ and I live in an apartment building that was originally built in the 1890's as a single family home. It has been converted into 7 apartments. Several years ago (50) they put in window unit air conditioners. Now, these air conditioners are 1) an eyesore, 2) they block the light from coming in the window 3) they don't work 4) they are covered with layers upon layers of dust 5) the landlord said I could take it out.

So, yours truly and her sometime brother decided to . . . get rid of the air conditioning unit. Here is the problem- it was securely braced to the outside of the window on the third floor. After thinking about it, we deicded it was against our better judgment to climb out on the roof to disconect it from the outside. So, one day I decided I would take it apart from the inside. It didn't take long to see that the unit (which was 2 feet wide and 3 feet deep) was actually placed into a brace and I removed the unit itself easily enough.

But, then I had a problem- the window was still braced open and I couldn't get the frame out. So, my window was open for a few days until I asked my brother to help me take the brace out. With some pushing and prodding, we disconnected the frame from the window until my brother was dangling it out the window, cussing under his breath while I stood behind him laughing uncontrollably. He wedged it back into the window, ran downstairs, moved my car and his car, and came back up. He then "accidentaly dropped" it out the window. We leaned on the now empty window sill, looked at each other, shook our heads and said, "aah, renters." AJ then ran down the stairs, took the broken frame to the trash pile and moved our cars back to their original parking spots.

I told my landlord about it and he just laughed, and said, "You have to live in it, and we plan to replace them all this coming summer anyhow."

So, on the scale of 1-10 how bad are we as renters?

Great 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 Terrible!