You can have your own room.

You can have a cat.

You can even have your own kitchen.

But sometimes you can also have a big headache from living under college-town slumlords.

Living off campus can be the joyful experience you always thought you would have without 50 other people on your floor or in your house, but the key to happy off-campus living is largely your own responsibility.

Okay, so it’s not the middle of April when those students who move off or live off campus are scrambling to find a place or renew their lease, but it is just about that time when you might be realizing all those beer cans from the tenants before might have been hiding nasty problems in your apartment when you checked it out before renting.

Or you may find that the previous tenants weren’t telling you everything about the landlord or the apartment just so they would be set free.

You begin to realize maybe you should have checked a little more carefully to see if the shower pipes were completely rusted through, or that one bedroom has only one outlet in the closet, half of which is taken up by the sump pump (imagine you live in a basement).

You begin to realize how many loopholes in the system there are.

You begin to understand that in the world of reality, the three Ames inspectors cannot possibly catch every problem in the 7,943 registered rental properties, especially when each rental unit is only checked every third year.

Building and Zoning inspector Craig Hageman said the contracts made between tenants and landlords are civil matters and that the inspectors “try to be the least intrusive as we can be because it is a business agreement.”

But if there is a inspection code, I believe inspectors have an obligation to at least make sure that every apartment passes the codes set up by the city. And that doesn’t always happen.

“We think we do a really good job … but we don’t go into your apartment and look in your closet. We do not move furniture and we do not touch personal properties, except maybe to look for smoke detectors or fire extinguishers. There are items that can be missed,” Hageman said.

If a qualified inspector misses problems in an apartment, then it can truly be difficult to examine the safety of an apartment while being rushed through in 10 minutes when someone is in the shower of the apartment — and you have three more to look at in a half-hour.

Also, decisions can be made swiftly and the result may be something you are unhappy with.

But there is something that can be done.

There are people who can help you get your apartment fixed up or help you get out of your lease, as long as you are living in unhealthy and unsafe conditions which are defined in the City of Ames inspection code.

Begin your empowerment by going to the Inspection Office and picking up a copy of the inspection code for the small charge of a dollar.

After you have searched your apartment up and down looking for either a fan or a window in bathrooms, two outlets in each room, a smoke detector on each level and all other conditions that must follow code, write everything down that is against code in your dwelling.

Then make a visit to the Adult Learner Commuter Student Programs office in B6 of the Memorial Union and speak with Ellen Fairchild, student helper and neglectful landlord foe.

Fairchild will discuss your options with you and may recommend that you write a letter to your landlord, listing all of the problems.

The form letter will not only give you the thrill of writing to someone, “Pursuant to Iowa code … ,” but it will begin the documentation process which will be important if complications arise.

A copy of the letter also should be sent to the rental housing office in the inspection department, which is located in City Hall.

The next step of the process is the waiting game, in which the landlord has seven days to remedy the problems or make a commitment to remedy the problems.

If the landlord takes no action, then a phone call to the inspections office may be appropriate to get the problems in the apartment fixed.

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Kathleen Carlson is a senior in journalism and mass communication and international studies from Cedar Rapids.