By Maureen Inouye
There is a "Simpsons" Halloween episode where the house is alive and tries to do everything it can to make the Simpsons leave.
My house did the same thing. I swear.
I guess I'm telling this story to share my experiences in a UP rental house
Moving into a rental this year was a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. Especially because I moved into the weirdest house in North Portland.
Along with my four housemates, I took up residence in our house about two weeks before school started. We were really excited to pick out furniture, paint and dishes.
But nothing could have prepared us for the absurdities and quirks of the Bluff House.
We call it the Bluff House because it overlooks the river. You could run down the hill behind the house and end up in the Willamette.
But the house hated us. Before we moved in, Physical Plant had to make a few renovations and I think the house resented this disruption of its normal routine. In revenge, the house decided to bombard us with problems and spiders.
The spiders are the worst. Now every time I walk into a room I scan it for arachnids just so I'm not surprised. I didn't know spiders with a five inch leg span lived anywhere outside the Amazon, but apparently they do - they live in my basement.
When we moved in, we were in awe of all the strange aspects of the house's structure as well.
We had stairs that led to nowhere, what looked like a bullet hole in our living room window, an oven that did not get hot and light switches that did not work unless you knew to turn a timer to a certain position. In other words, we had a puzzle.
We spent two weeks just discovering random nooks and crawl spaces. You want a secret passage? We have more than one. And a creepy basement that looks like something out of a horror film. I still cannot go down there alone at night.
I would like to thank both Residence Life and the Physical Plant for their help in dealing with the house from "Alice in Wonderland."
Physical Plant employees have more than 50 residences to oversee, and get 15 to 25 work order requests per week, but even they realized the Bluff House was special. Both Fay Beeler and Sandy Galati, of Physical Plant, said the house had "personality."
"It's incredible. I feel proud of that house," Beeler said. She and Galati took a certain interest in the house just because it was so strangely set up.
The workers at Physical Plant have tried their hardest to help us tame the house. They did a lot of renovations in the Bluff House before we even moved in.
Workers added a hallway, closed off a door leading from my room to Laurie's, created another door, tore down the rooster wall paper (but left the pink and green cupboards, of which I'm rather fond) and generally made the house livable.
After we moved in, workers replaced the stove, patched the hole in the window, fixed broken blinds, took all the bars off the windows, and made sure all our lights worked (which they did not when we moved in).
Thanks to what Beeler called "a woman's touch," our house, in the last week, has finally stopped creating problems. Our huge basement is still scary and there are still spiders everywhere, but at least we can bake using our new oven and see out our windows.
Now, if someone could just tell me how to kill the giant spiders using only my mind, my rental house would be perfect.
So if you are thinking of living in a rental next year, UP rentals can be pretty interesting. And Residence Life and the Physical Plant will help you if you're house is just crazy.
Maureen Inouye is a senior reporter for The Beacon
