Moving month
It’s that time of the year again.
The scene of overflowing Dumpsters and people and trailers everywhere at dozens of apartment complexes in Mount Pleasant is getting more prevalent with each passing day as the semester draws near.
Students and city residents, like Skip and Cheryl Smith, have spent this summer cleaning out and readying the various complexes surrounding CMU’s campus.
They said it takes about four hours to clean an apartment, but they don’t have to do it alone – they get help from workers with their company, Dynamic Cleaning Services.
“Between now and Aug. 15, 456 apartments are going to be full. That’s a lot of kids,” Skip Smith said about Jamestown Apartment complex. “Aug. 1 through Aug. 15 is just mass chaos.”
Horton senior Julie Wortman got a preview of that scene as she was moving into Jamestown, 4075 S. Isabella Road, Saturday, with her mother, Connie, helping.
The worst of it was that someone forgot to close the latch on their U-Haul, they said.
“A stereo and some computer chairs got a little road rash,” Connie Wortman said.
The chairs survived, but the stereo’s CD tray was stuck in the out-position after its brush with Broomfield Road.
“It was the only weekend we could move in,” Julie Wortman said. Her old lease from Copper Beech Town Homes, 4750 E. Bluegrass Road, and her new one with Jamestown overlapped for only a few days.
Stephanie Schweiger and her mother signed a lease to live at Olivieri Management’s Oakridge Apartments while friend Chad Teltow, Casco resident, waited in his air-conditioned truck to help unload a trailer full of stuff last weekend.
Schweiger learned that she was accepted into graduate school a week before signing and managed to get what she said was “the last two-bedroom apartment in town.”
“(CMU) could have given me more notice,” she said, stressed from the last minute arrangements she and her mother had to make last week.
She took the keys and spent the hot afternoon moving everything she will need for the next year into her new apartment.
“This is my last time,” she said, “No more moving in, only moving out. It’s a pain in my rear end.”
The Schweigers were not the only people sweating last weekend.
Ortonville senior Abby Robertson and her father, Cliff, were moving furniture into a horse trailer on a sweltering Saturday.
Abby Robertson was moving out of Copper Beech apartments after a year there.
Her roommate, Kate Daniels, won a year of free rent at Quality apartments, and the two decided it would be a better place.
The family said they spent more time cleaning than moving.
Students are moving into 50 new apartments this weekend, said Keith Cotter, property manager for Copper Beech, where only one apartment at Copper Beech was available as of Friday.
Brown, Cotter and representatives from United Apartments and Olivieri Management said most leases will start between Aug. 1 and Aug. 15.
