And the drama goes on...pt. 1

There's no lack of drama around here lately. The Sunday flood issues (see previous post) are still being resolved.

Sunday evening my landlord finally called me back and said they'd be by again on Monday to work on drying the carpet some more. So at 9:30pm, I drag my mattress (futon) upstairs to my living room and put it on the floor. Somehow I manage to do this without getting the mattress wet by dropping or dragging it on the wet bedroom carpet. Chalk one up for anger-induced strength. Sunday night I sleep upstairs in my living room. This is strange, and confounds the cat, who keeps meowing at me to go downstairs to bed. On the other hand, she is also quite happy to have a giant soft surface to play/sleep on, so I don't think she quite understands that it's the mattress.

Monday, Aug. 3, 2009

Monday I wake up and call my landlord before 9am. I spend a bit of time explaining why the wet-vac ain't gonna cut it at this point. I convince her, and she's going to call professionals to come in and dry it and make sure all is well. I also have to provide her with the names of several companies (mad librarian search skillz FTW!) because she has no idea who to call. I give her three names and numbers. She makes calls and we settle in to wait. A little after 11am she tells me someone is supposed to be here between 11am and 1pm. OK. And we wait. My bedroom is now so musty and muggy I can hardly breathe and it's triggering my asthma (I keep coughing uncontrollably...a bad sign for me). It's been over 24 hours so I know the carpet is toast and will have to be replaced at this point. Cleaning it is no longer an option...the mold has set in.

At nearly 2pm we are still waiting. She calls back as well as calling the other places. She tells me all three work together and the first one she calls knows she's called the other two and is pissed off at her for calling them. Well, duh. If you don't show up as promised naturally people will look for other options. At 6:30pm I get another update from my landlord. They are still coming, the question is WHEN? A little later, the first company calls and says that a., they won't be coming until tomorrow now (but again, won't give a time) and b., they need at least $2000 just. to. show. up. OMG really? Landlord tells them to forget it, and she ends up calling Stanley Steamer. It's now after 7pm. Stanley Steamer doesn't come that night. Landlord brings by a dehumidifier to try and control the damp air if nothing else. I sleep in my living room again, my bedroom carpet still soaking wet and the air very musty/muggy, to the point I can no longer breathe in there at all (all I do is cough, which, again, is BAD and a sign my cough-variant asthma is kicking in).

Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2009

I wake up and brace myself for the waiting game. Email various people at work to let them know and settle in with coffee and my remote desktop connection to get some reports and indexing project work done. Landlord calls Stanley Steamer people again and they say someone will be out that afternoon. I tell my landlord that the carpet is not salvageable at this point, it's been too long and there's no way to effectively clean it. What's more, because of my asthma any remaining mold could put me in the hospital with a severe respiratory infection and could kill me. She says let's wait and see what the professionals say. Grumble. I don't think she's really listening. MOLD = POSSIBLY DEADLY to an asthmatic, not to mention people with healthy lungs. No lie.

I see pictures of the flood in Louisville that devastated the public library via Twitter. OMG. The pictures make me gasp and are shockingly terrible. It's just an awful situation. And it certainly puts my issue in perspective. Still, I know my flood, while minor by comparison, needs to be resolved too.

Stanley Steamer shows up around 2:30pm. And thank the lords they back me and immediately tell her that the carpet needs to go. That they can smell the mold that's already growing in it. It's been wet too long now to be cleaned/dried and salvaged. It needs to be ripped out, along with the padding, and trashed. I am relieved. They want the room cleaned out, the baseboards, carpet and padding removed, and then they will spray the entire room and lower walls with an anti-microbial agent to kill any mold that's there. Once that dries, we are free to lay new carpet. OK. Sounds like a plan.

Landlord's dad (one who actually owns the property) shows up to get the estimate from them. He gets the estimate, and tells them they (landlords) will pull out the carpet. They make an appointment for them to come back on Wed. afternoon to do the anti-microbial spraying. The Stanley Steamer guys leave.

My landlord then offers me some lovely unsolicited advice in the form of a website promising a "natural cure" for allergies and allergy-induced asthma. I politely thank him and explain that my asthma isn't allergy related, but rather a portion of my lungs just don't work and I'm extra susceptible to respiratory infections and that said infections can get very serious and even deadly very easily if not taken care of. So, um, NO. Thanks but also "natural cures" like that one, well, it just doesn't work that way. Grrr.

He leaves and then people (more of landlords family, including my usual contact person) come in to move the furniture out of my bedroom. My bed is dismantled, and it and my dressers are placed in the hallway. Good thing it's a long hallway. They pull off the baseboards. I am disturbed to see mold on the backside of several of them, so I point it out and say that is NOT coming back into this room. Period. Landlord's daughter (my usual contact), says OK and promises they will be trashed instead (I'll be checking when they reinstall baseboards to make absolutely sure). They rip out the carpet, padding and tack strips, and clean up the resulting mess. The dehumidifier is put back in the now empty room in an attempt to start the drying process before they spray.

I realize my entire bedroom will be in the hallway and I'll be sleeping in the living room for the rest of the week. They won't be able to lay carpet for a good 36 hours after spraying, so the earliest new carpet will go down is Friday. GAH.

I go to sleep in my living room, cranky, but glad that things are finally getting done.

[To be continued...]

Time to build an ark, me thinks

I've been in my current apartment just over a year now. In that time I've been besieged by water issues. A useful detail to understanding things: I'm in a split level 2 bedroom apartment. My living space is upstairs, and the 2 bedrooms are downstairs in the finished basement. There are two baths, one upstairs and one down. My landlord is the member of the family responsible for this property, so "landlord" is somewhat misleading as it's not just her that I'm ultimately dealing with. She's just my specific contact person. Her family owns several properties that they manage.

Now back to the true tale of my water woes.

First it was a leaking pipe from the upstairs bathroom that was dripping into my bedroom right below it. It showed up within 2 weeks of me moving in. Various holes were created either by the water itself or to track the leak. I lived with holes in my ceiling and a bucket (plus a trash can at times) in my bedroom for a good 6 months until they found the source. I didn't use the upstairs bathroom either because why would I want to make the drip happen?!? So for the first 6 months I lived in this apartment I basically only had one bathroom, despite paying for two. Then I lived with the holes in my ceiling until they *finally* patched the holes over 6 months later.

Then the leak in the kitchen ceiling appeared. It was leaking from the same place it did previously, evidenced by the patch already there, so clearly there's been a leak in the roof before. For several months I had a bucket to catch the drips. Then the leak spread. So I added a trash can. And another. You can see the set-up here on Flickr. Eventually they fixed the hole in the roof (or I'm assuming they did as the drips stopped), but not before the drywall tape on the patch fell down so I had it dangling from my ceiling. When they finally patched the bedroom ceiling they put the tape back up.

I though things were finally calming down and the water issues had been finally resolved.

I was wrong. So very very wrong.

Now we have a new water problem. The Friday I got back from ALA (July 17th for those keeping track), we had a terrific thunderstorm. The drains outside the house couldn't handle the deluge. But instead of just sitting outside until it had a chance to drain, the water found someplace to go. It seeped through the foundation (or found a hole), and made a nice puddle on the floor of my bedroom. Specifically it soaked the area under my bed, and spread into the middle of the room. I called my landlord. The next day they brought a wet-vac along with the other supplies to make the final repairs as planned. They vacuumed up the water, and moved my dehumidifier into my bedroom along with an extra fan I have to help finish the drying process.

I lived with the dehumidifier in there for a week. Things seemed to dry out sufficiently.

Then we had another deluge. This morning (Sunday, Aug. 2nd, for those keeping track) we had a fantastic thunderstorm, just like the one a few weeks ago. The skies opened up and it just poured. I watched the water build up outside by the drain. So I went to check my bedroom. And my carpet was wet again. The water was clearly coming in along the base of the wall, so essentially through the brick/stone foundation. I curse and run down the hall to get the rag towels to try and soak up some of the water. I spread them out under my bed, specifically around the bedposts, and along the wall where it's coming in.

I head back upstairs and call my landlord. She starts making phone calls and sends someone over with the wet-vac. It's still pouring. I go back downstairs. OMFG I HAVE A SMALL LAKE THAT IS NOW COVERING HALF OF MY BEDROOM. The towels are completely overwhelmed by the amount of water and are useless. It's coming in all along the wall now, not just in a few small places. What's worse, when the water came it, it also brought debris, so there's dirt and crap all over the place.

I go back upstairs. I call my landlord back and let her know the magnitude of the problem. I let her know that this problem clearly needs a professional to come in, clean up the water and fix the foundation. This is way way beyond what a general handyman can fix.

A couple people from my landlord's family come by with the wet-vac. Since I had last called my landlord I notice that there's water coming in behind the fridge in the kitchen. I point it out and they pull the fridge out from the wall (partially blocking the doorway). One person goes outside to find out where it's coming in. The two young dudes head downstairs with the wet-vac and start vacuuming up the water. The rain is still coming down. The guy that went outside to inspect where the water upstairs is coming from finds that it's coming from next door. He then starts trying to speed up the drains. One is has debris partially blocking it. Debris that ran down the steps from the yard. The other is pretty much completely blocked in the pipe so there's no speeding it up.

The rain finally lets up. The dudes are still vacuuming. They leave around 2:30ish, saying they'll be back later to do another pass. I call my landlord to check in and find out what's going on. She tells me she's talking to others in the family and they're going to find someone to come deal with this and she'll let me know.

It's now 8:00pm. No one has returned to do another wet-vac pass. My landlord hasn't called me. So I call her and leave a message letting her know that that's NOT OK. I need to know what the plan is. And this needs to be fixed by a professional within the next week. One week is a reasonable amount of time given the magnitude of the problem and the amount of water that came in this time. If the water keeps increasing, eventually the entire basement will flood. Not only that, if the water keeps coming in every time we have a major thunderstorm (it is that time of year, mind you), things will never dry out, which will beget mold, which could potentially kill me given my asthma. And I'm really not exaggerating.

So now I wait. I wait for them to respond. I wait to find out the plan. I wait for some kind of action on their part. I #$*@%! hate waiting.

Oh, and to add insult to injury? My kitchen light is not always turning on. Sometimes it works when I flip the switch, other times it comes 1/2 way on, and sometimes nothing happens until I flip the switch off and on a few times. That makes me nervous. There quite possibly could be some sort of electrical issue stemming from the leak in the kitchen roof. Yeah, that's freaking me out a bit.