Pros:
-The room and closet are large.
-Many things are within walking distance or a short drive.
-There’s a grocery store and a 7-Eleven across the street.
-Antonina let me have a lot of space in the fridge and didn’t mind me cooking.
-She’s gone a lot so you have the place to yourself sometimes.
Cons:
-I’m not sure why this is listed as a Bed & Breakfast because B&B’s serve food and she barely even cooked for herself.
-There’s not a lot of cooking utensils in the kitchen so it’s hard to cook sometimes, she even has a chipped plate in the cabinet she actively uses.
-No amenities.
-She’s very hard to communicate with because English isn’t her first language.
-Sometimes when I got home the shared areas would smell of marijuana.
-There were often cockroaches on the kitchen counter that she was fully aware of, but she continued to leave open containers of food on the counter which made the situation worse.
-I found hair and toenail clippings stuck in the rug and glitter on the table when I arrived.
-If you have a car, parking is almost impossible and cars got set on fire on two different occasions.
-She gave me one bath towel and one hand towel for my entire 5 month stay. The towels in the pictures were nowhere to be seen.
-Yes it’s LA but the area and apartment building are very loud:
Antonina plays music and talks on the phone loudly, the neighbors upstairs exercise at 6 am every weekday which woke me up constantly, the 7-Eleven parking lot below the window houses a lot of loud, homeless people and car alarms constantly going off.
-She disappears for weeks at a time without any notice, refuses to let me know when she will return and is hard to reach during those times. She was in Italy for over a month twice during my stay and didn’t tell me anything. Because she is gone a lot, cleaning rarely gets done and it was up to me to keep things clean. Additionally, I was having problems with the lock/keypad on the front door while she was out of the country and it took her almost 2 weeks to resolve the problem.
-The room gets very hot in the summer and pretty chilly in the winter. I had to buy a fan because she got upset with me when I used the AC unit. It was the same way during the winter with the heating unit. It also doesn’t help that the unit is in the living room and even with the door open, the air doesn’t travel very well.
-I couldn’t use the dishwasher for some unknown reason so I had to hand wash everything.
-For a few weeks after I arrived I was sleeping on two pairs of sheets. When I finally decided to wash the bedding and discovered this, it seemed like she put clean sheets on top of sheets she had been sleeping on previously.
-You have to pay for laundry and there’s only two washers and two dryers in the building. For months there was only one working dryer.
-The day before I left, I told her three times when I was leaving and she offered to help me with my 5 bags. The next morning when it was time for me to leave, she was showering and never helped me with my bags or said goodbye to me.