Do you literally mean that their cooking caused clouds of smoke in your apartment? It is what you said and I just want to get a reference point on that.
There was not smoke exactly, but when they would cook there would be a thick haze throughout the entire apartment. Our smoke alarms never went off or anything. We ended up figuring out that it was coming through the shared wall somehow, but it was the absolute worst in the downstairs 1/2 bath there. There was a thing in the ceiling - some type of venting in the 1/2 bath with the laundry room and when we opened it, it was the worst there.
It was so strong and so bad, it would come around the plumbing in all bathrooms/tubs/showers. I'd go to take a shower, or bath my child and it was like he was bathing in whatever they were cooking. They cooked very fragrant food multiple times a day, so it wasn't really livable and the property manager there just sent out HVAC - they said it was a "pressure" situation and we were told it was "normal" to smell your neighbors cooking time to time. On top of that, we were told it was cleaned and sanitized before we moved in - the entire place was carpet besides the kitchen/baths and I was picking up buckets of black dirt in my vacuum no matter how many times I went over it.
Then, there were bugs. TONS and tons of bugs... it was like we were living in an abandoned storage facility over a restaurant - not a "luxury townhouse". We had the movers leave everything in the garage and we were going to move it in ourselves after a few days because of the pandemic and it seemed the safest way to handle it. We never were able to move the majority of our things in because it was so disgusting - and we left them outside in the garage which my husband said would be totally fine for a few months.
At the end of the day, it took us 3 months to find this place and move, which was new and everything around us was still being built. It's a beautiful apartment - I never hear or smell my neighbors. There is way less carpet. But, the freezing cold air blowing out of every floorboard all winter and the smell was really hard to manage.
I assumed that maybe the odor in the apartment was that - the smell of that stuff we were getting rid of. But everything has been gone forever, except for the smell and now this weird urine smell that wasn't there to begin with. On top of it, I'm sick and sneezing everyday since the air has been turned on and I'm not sure if it's a mold issue or a pest issue even though I've seen no evidence of anything. We just have a disgusting odor, allergies for me and my toddler and now this stain around the hallway upstairs AC vent.
I'm at a total loss here. They're supposed to be in touch tomorrow but this has been a few week process of the same story, so I am planning to call the building inspector just to cover my bases. I'm wondering if because air is being drawn in through the garage and leaking in, if mold spores got into the ductwork and when the AC turned on, not it's turned into mold I can't see. That, with the humidity makes the most sense to me - but at this point I have no idea. The majority of our being sick started when the air was running everyday though and the humidity got high.
It has been a rough, rough year. We had lived in the same apartment for 5 years prior to these two moves and didn't want to move, but we had college students move in that stayed up yelling and screaming until 6 am everyday and it couldn't be resolved through management. Then the pandemic and lockdown happened and it was so, so awful. We could hear EVERY word of their conversation all day long and then screaming and doors slamming all night with a little tiny baby. If we have to move from this place, I don't even know where to look. I assumed new was the way to go, but now I'm unsure.
. There’s like a little orange looking box up inside under there though whatever that might be.