Oliver Apartments

"First of all, take pictures of everything when you move in and move out. You are asked to clean the apartment to how it was when you moved in upon move out, however I left the apartment much cleaner than when i moved in but they kept my entire security deposit anyway and sent me a statement in the mail saying I owed them even more money, which I will probably begrudgingly pay to avoid any issues with my credit. There were charges for cleaning windows (which were cleaned before leaving), screens (which aren't removable and were broken from the day we moved in), cleaning the microwave and the bathtub (both were very clean when I left, except for a permanent stain/discoloration on the tub floor that was there when we moved in, and the tub was dirty when we moved in anyway). I didn't take any pictures on move in or leaving and I regret that now. I would have seriously considered taking them to court if I had anything more than my word to support myself. 2 people spent 7 hours cleaning the apartment, to put into perspective how much effort was put into cleaning. On the positive side, its REALLY nice that they give you the freedom to give a couple months notice and then move out. After the first 9 months the lease is month to month, so you aren't locked in until a certain date. It's a fine place to live if you don't expect too much. There isn't enough parking in the lot for everyone, so in the winter there's the risk of being towed if you are parked on the street and it snows (but you do get 1 garage stall so no problem if you just have 1 car). Maintenance was really fast for me; our freezer broke and within 2 days we had a new refrigerator in our kitchen. Snow plowing was sometimes quite slow though. There were a few times we were unable to enter or leave the parking lot because plowing didn't get done. Never had any issues with insects or rodents or anything like that. The hallways do smell a bit odd most of the time. Lots of closet space and a large living room compared to others we saw. The 1 1/2 bathrooms we had is more than most apartments in this price range. In apartments on the side of the building facing Penn Ave be aware that you need blackout curtains/blinds to keep out the lights from businesses and the street at night if you want a dark bedroom. One big negative is that the heat barely works and the building is poorly insulated. You can hold your bare hand on the heating element without it getting too hot, but maintenance said it wasn't broken, that it just couldn't keep up with the winter temps. You have to get used to not being able to get the apartment above low 60's in the winter. Remembering the heating almost made me switch this review to 2 stars, because looking back it feels absurd that we had to deal with that. The manager seems pretty disorganized. She had the wrong time on her calendar for both our original tour and for our final check out. I had to call her to get her to show up to our tour before moving in, and she showed up hours early for my check out and had no clue what time it was supposed to be. She was slow to return calls (a couple business days) but I didn't need to get ahold of her often so it didn't matter much. Apart from not getting my security deposit back i never had any real issues with her."