Disappointment

We've been pretty busy, preparing the apartment for the upcoming move. The landlord is sending someone over to inspect the apartment to see if any renovations are needed. They gave us a 5 day spread, starting tomorrow, of when someone might be coming over. Of course, the place is a disaster right now, as we sort through things and decide what to get rid of, what can be packed early and, of course, cleaning.

The girls and I have seen the new place, which was an even worse disaster than our apartment right now. *L* The previous resident was actually voted out - a rare thing in a co-0p - and she'd left quite a mess behind. She'd made a lot of unapproved changes that will need to be fixed during the renovation. We brought home samples to choose the new lino, carpet and paint colours.

Since they have to keep in mind that, if we end up moving out a few years down the road, they'll have to do this again, we were asked to keep the "public" areas in more neutral colours. In other words, avoid things like bright red, which would be almost impossible to paint over, but we could choose whatever we wanted for the bedrooms and upstairs bathroom (oh, and the place really is the second and third levels - there's an assisted living unit underneath us). The girls picked dark greens for their bedrooms, I picked a mid-range greyish blue for the bathroom to match the lino, and a mid-range green for the master bedroom. The rest was going to be a very pale green. All four of us liked a dusty rose colour for the carpet and a mixed stone pattern with greys, blues and dark greens for the lino. We were pretty excited about our choices, and I got positive responses when I dropped off the swatches and showed our choices at the office.

This morning I called the co-op to get our new postal address. After getting it, the woman I was talking to then dropped the bad news.

The maintenance guy rejected most of our colour choices.

The very pale green and the lino were ok, but he chose a tan colour for the carpet and the other walls were going to be cool white. I'm hoping she was able to get ahold of him before he bought the paint, as he was already leaving to get it. I quickly told her that, if he had to change the colours, to just do all of it in the very pale green. The last thing we wanted was white!!!

Now, she wasn't the least bit happy telling me this. When I showed her our choices, the only thing she did was make sure I realized how dark those greens would be in a whole room for the girls' choices. I'd left it to the girls to choose whatever they wanted, and she was ok with that. There aren't "public" areas, after all.

Apparently, the maintenance guy can not only overrule our choices, but can make his own choices without consulting us. I guess this sort of hits it home. Although we're part owners of the complex once we buy are shares, and the unit is ours, it's not really ours. (Hmm... doesn't that contradict a democratically run complex?)

We completely understand their need to keep future costs down - the carpet alone will cost $8000 to replace - but we would have appreciated it if we could've had another chance to decide. Or at least be told our choices were being rejected before he went to buy something else! I could've given her other choices over the phone, if time was such an issue. Otherwise, why give us a choice in the first place? Perhaps he's still reeling from all the chemicals he's had to use to fix what the previous resident did - he'd just acid washed the tub when we saw the place, and he still had to strip the paint she'd used on the metal bannister.

The thing is, part of the excitement of getting our own place was that we were finally able to choose our own colours. Sure, our choices were somewhat limited - I found that reasonable - but it irks me to no end that our choices were simply taken away from us arbitrarily by one person.

So now I'm not sure about the colours at all. The carpet will be "tan." Well, that could be any number of the colours in the sample book. We'd actually considered a couple of them. I'm really hoping that it isn't beige. Beige would be as bad as white walls. However, we picked the pale green because it went well with the dusty rose carpet. I'm having a hard time imagining that green against any of the "tan" samples I remember in the book.

*sigh*