A better look

On moving day, after the moving company left, and I finally got to have a good look around, I was shocked to find that the flat was much filthier than I thought it was on the day of the viewing.

As we tried to clean, it became obvious there were bigger issues than simple dirt, and the longer I lived there, the more I learned those issues included several life-threateninginfestations.

All of my guesses at what the crap covering everything was, was certainly correct to a point, for example, the inside of the toilet was covered in human waste, so I expect the outside was to some extent too, however what other parts of the crap was, I never could have imagined because I had never lived in a slum before becoming a Torus tenant.

Now I know the bath and tiles in the bathroom weren’t dirty, they were mouldy, as were the blinds in the bedroom, which I couldn’t replace, due to the window they were covering also being mouldy, and in such a bad condition we couldn’t get it off.

Probably, predicably, the carpet didn’t look like it had been cleaned, but that could also have been mould, and it was infested with flees.

There were bloody handprints smeared along one of the walls in the bedroom. I found the source of this blood when the flees forced me to rip up the carpet. Whoever had fitted it, had cut themselves badly on the carpet grips, bled all over the flat, and never cleaned it up. And just to show you how much blood had not been cleaned up, it was obvious they cut themselves in the Livingroom, yet there were puddles of dried blood all over the hallway and bedroom floor, underneath the carpet.

Behind the door in the bathroom was a heated towel rail that was so rusty we couldn’t remove it all.

The entire flat was covered in either male body hair, pubes, or a combination of both.

When we were cleaning the kitchen, I noticed these hard, weird black lumps that sort of resembled instant coffee grounds, but which felt like they were glued down, and theywere in only the lower cupboards and not the cupboards up on the wall. The reason for that, I found out later, was because it was mouse crap. Which means the brown puddles next to it must have been mouse piss.

The first time I tried to open the top draw of the kitchen cabinet, it fell off and almost took my toes off with it, it smashed me in the foot that hard.

The previous tenant had left behind grimy, rusty pans, a mouldy shower curtain, and a virgin media box, none ofwhich Torus removed, because the probably never even inspected the flat before letting me view it, or after.