T w e n t y S i d e d
This week’s post will be a little on the shorter side, I’m recovering from the flu and Christmas is in just a couple of days. The observant of you will notice that means I’m writing this the same day it goes up, to which I say; snitches get stitches.
Jokes aside, I don’t usually write so late. The issue is, this week has been a shit storm. It was last week when we noticed our ceiling in the dining room was a bit…slack?
.jpg "This was taken to show our property manager, so it's low quality and sideways via phone photography. Just, tilt your head to the left or your device to the right. Or, if you like, do neither and pretend my entire home is sideways.")
Come to find out that our property company just had every single maintenance man quit at the same time. Don’t tell anyone but I’m a bit relieved to find this out. Our head maintenance guy was just..so very, very sexist. Just, one of those brands of people that you’re not even sure how they’re still around. Like, are they bussed in from 1910? What are you even doing here, man? This means we have to wait for an external company to come to check it out, which is fine, I guess. The ceiling sags more and more, but like, we did what we could in reporting the issue, I don’t own the place, so, whatever.
Well, by the time they show up I am in the full swing of a case of the flu. My phone has been updating unsuccessfully for two days so I don’t get the call they are on their way. And I feel like crap.
Fine, at least it’ll get fixed.
They go upstairs to over top of where the damage is and do the same song and dance we did when we first noticed the issue; poke the floor. Is it wet? No? Huh, weird.
They determine they need to cut a hole in the ceiling to find the problem, which I expected, but like…Oh man, goody! All I wanted for Christmas was a view of support beams! Yay!
Whatever, let’s do this. We move our shelves and books out of the way to make room, and they get to work.
They slice out this sizable gash with a box cutter, which immediately begins spewing water all over the floor. The insulation is wet, the floor is wet, the table beneath it is wet, it’s a mess. I am half-asleep in my recliner at this point, but I am brought fully to the realm of the living by both the maintenance man and my husband saying “What…the fuck?”. Now, Elliot curses, but he is a fully born-and-raised west Texas boy, so he doesn’t typically or really ever do so in front of company.
This brings me to my favorite thing about this. No matter how clever or realistic I’m being in my little Sims build, I will never beat reality. No matter how much human nature I think up, no matter how many little quirks I give the place, there is no accounting for full human stupidity.
What was in my ceiling? Fully sealed up there behind a full previous repair and fresh plaster?
A dog bowl. A dog bowl full of water.
Evidently, our air conditioner has been leaking for years, and rather than repair it, some maintenance man of old decided to seal in a dog bowl to catch the leak.
Happy holidays, don’t forget to drip your faucets and check your ceilings for dog bowls.
Footnotes:
[1] Don’t tell anyone but I’m a bit relieved to find this out. Our head maintenance guy was just..so very, very sexist. Just, one of those brands of people that you’re not even sure how they’re still around. Like, are they bussed in from 1910? What are you even doing here, man?
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Ah, you just gotta love a temporary solution becoming a permanent solution. Because usually, they don’t become a solution, just a future problem.
Ceiling-dog must have gone home early for Christmas!
….and now I’m getting all nostalgic about Roof Dog, RIP
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/indie-band-the-vaccines-lead-tributes-to-roof-dog-who-became-unlikely-mascot-for-brixton-pub-10438026.html
(We used to live close to the place, and it’s high on my list of coolest places ever)
That sounds like the apartment my wife and I lived in when we first got married. It was good until the old manager quit. The lead maintenance guy was her husband. After that, we went a long time with a gash in the ceiling from a water issue. 1970s construction.
Our power bills there were only a bit less than our power bills in our house are now…
About 7-8 years ago, the house we were living in started to have a similar “soggy” look in one of the ceilings, like the sheetrock had turned into Papier-mâché. I started messing around with it, and turns out that there had been water damage in the ceiling at some point, but the previous owner decided to just cover up the holes with packing tape and then painted over the tape to make it look like a normal part of the ceiling. I managed to get a guy off of Craigslist to repair it with actual sheetrock and match the textured paint so the ceiling looked fully whole again for just $200.
Ah, I suspect them (the HVAC person) was from the venerable form of Bodgitt & Leggitt. I… don’t quite understand why they’d do that, because it CLEARLY would lead to this sort of thing, eventually.
Well, after the ‘fix’ stops working, it’s probably Bodgitt & Leggitt’s descendants who’d get the call to fix it again…
Got tarps over the (main) spot where the roof is leaking here- not a permanent temporary solution, but rather a temporary solution some number of years too late (the hole inside is pretty gnarly). My brother and I would have tried fixing it but holy crap roofing materials have got expensive and we technically don’t even know what we’re doing (and the whole roof will likely need to be replaced in order to keep the place anyway).
The Christmas I was going to join may be cancelled- or if not, I might chicken out anyway, ’cause they got some sort of sick over there and it won’t have even been a full week since (and if the kids catch it, even less).
Sickness and leaks, yay winter?
Reminds me of the surprise chimney sfdebris found.
Or earlier this year, my sister was looking at a house and they heard a cat trapped in the wall that they wound up cutting out once they were able to contact the current owner. She bought that house and while doing some electrical work, my cousin found a litter box in the attic.
As someone who had plenty of horror stories (involving a few electrocutions) with rent homes, yep, that’s about right.
My current home has fried several electrical appliances and, according to an electrician we hired to fix the shower head the second time it burned, it is because the electrical installation of the house is shit. Even my computer almost went kaput, but fortunately it had a very good power supply unit that sacrificed itself to save the rest. Unfortunately the new power supply is second hand and I’m skeptical it would make the same heroic sacrifice… with luck I move out before this house kills my PC.
Get a fused power strip to plug your PC into, so if it happens again you lose a cheap power strip not an expensive PC part!
A fuse may stop it from exploding because there was a power surge, but it won’t stop long-term damage from dirty power. An UPS may help some, but even so the only thing that will really keep the rest of the components safe is a good-quality power supply.
It is already connected to a power strip.
It wasn’t a power surge. The electrical installation is just bad and unpredictable.
Strangely enough, despite being about a home this is a very good programming blogpost.
All it needs is a post-it on the A/C saying “TODO: fix this.” :p
Or for the dog bowl to have been placed into a second, larger bowl, for overflow. And sealed back up like that.
I tested positive for covid yesterday, so I get a spend a week isolating this year
happy festivus!
Out of curiosity, what caused the dog bowl to fill up now? (If you happen to know, or have a guess.) My first thought while reading the post was “oh, that dog bowl must’ve been sufficient in the past (the evaporation rate exceeded the dripping rate), but now the AC’s running more and it overflowed” then realized you probably weren’t running the AC in the winter.
A/C in heating mode produces a fair amount of condensation.
The one for my home office produces effectively nothing in cooling mode (it evaporates it off into the exhaust for additional cooling), but about 500ml/day in heating mode.
Does the US commonly do that?
From now on, I think you need to hide a dog bowl somewhere in every Sims build you do. Something needs to be done to honor the absolute absurdity of this situation!
I hope you’re feeling much better now.
Oh man… I’ve heard of lazy DIY fixes, but this one takes the cake. O.o Hopefully the maintenance guy this time can come up with a more permanent solution; it occurs to me that it’s possible the original fix was because the proper fix would cost so much money that the owners just opted for the cheap fix-it. As an example, the house I recently moved into last year has a serious water issue as well. One of the rooftop drain pipes is cracked and whenever it rained (which is at least 3-4 times a week in my country), water would basically be pouring out of the walls and seams of the floor. It was BAD. Unfortunately, the drain pipe was actually sealed up inside the wall AND it ran all the way from the roof down three floors to the ground. Tracking down the break would basically involve tearing the entire wall of the house open, finding the crack, replacing potentially the entire pipe, and cost us at least $30,000. So in the end, we opted for another solution; we sealed up the drain pipe inlets on the roof, and then bored a new hole on the roof that led out to a new pipe we installed that ran down the outside wall of the house instead. That one still cost us about $2000, but it was WAY cheaper than the alternative.
Jesus, I complain a lot about how terribly built some parts of my house are, but this is on another level.
Two of my favorite quotes, though I never remember who they are attributed to, are:
“Nothing is quite so permanent as a temporary solution” and “There is never time to do it right, but there is always time to do it over.”
These truths have repeated over and over so often in my experience, I just laugh now when I see it.
Not anywhere near as bad, but at my work there’s a leak right near an HVAC duct. (I say HVAC, but it’s really just the chimney for one of the massive industrial heaters trying to heat the repair shop with no insulation whose garage doors are constantly opening.) Every now and then we’ll get someone to look at it, and every time the property manager’s roofing people say it’s the HVAC leaking on the inside, which makes it our problem, and the HVAC people say it’s leaking on the outside which makes it the property manager’s problem. It never gets fixed, and we have to be very careful not to move the shop computer or part number reference books when it’s raining.
Ahh yes, we had our air conditioning replaced a few years ago and 12 months ago I noticed some dampness and mould on an outside wall.
Moved the cupboard away from the corresponding interior wall and it was covered in black mould.
The air conditioning installer had attempted to plumb the drain pipe into the external guttering, but the drain pipe was a few inches too short and was draining into the wall cavity instead.
Little did you know when you removed the rats from the walls, that they were actually serving a vital maintenance role by drinking all that water.
That feels like an adventure game puzzle.
I actually have two moisture problems in my house.
First one is fixed, but it took a while. The building is new but build very quickly, so a lot of mistakes were made (like doors having gaps, front door has so much space between it and its frame it causes the wind to make whistling when it blows against it). So the shower drain from the apartment above me wasnt properly sealed, and caused the ceiling of my bathroom to get wet. It has this chalk deposit stuff sprayed on it (so it has a rough surface) and that started to sag and turn black from mold. Took half a year before they could get in contact with the person living above me to fix the drain. Then they cleaned up my ceiling. 2 years later the problem came back and I had to do the whole song and dance again. A painter had to redo the ceiling (but of course I never got a confirmation the drain was fixed, so i had to call again to see if the painter could come).
The other problem is that my appartment is at the bottom of the building. All the central heating units are connected to the same big chimney. The water vapor from the burnt gas condenses in the chimney and falls down to my level, where it flows into a tiny tube that goes to the sewer. Once every few years the tube gets backed up by soot and the chimney fills up, until it starts leaking. So a guy comes by, pokes around in the tube, and then it fixed for a while.
That doesn’t sound like it’s up to code.
Though what you could or even should do about that is another matter :(
I feel like there’s a lot of potential for combining House Flipper with the internal simulation of something like Tin Can or Deep Sixed – a game where leaky pipes or bad wiring aren’t just a single thing that need to get patched up but something that causes cascading failures throughout your house (rotten drywall, black mold, decaying joists, etc) so you have to figure out what’s wrong while tearing out as few walls as possible.
I loved this post.
Between the present-tense writing style and the ludicrous situation, this story feels like a morphic resonance flashback to the very heyday of blogging. This could have been from Waiter Rant.
Absolutely amazing. I’m almost speechless, lol. That is a hell of a “fix”.
The horror stories people are sharing reminded me of the house I grew up in. It was on an island, in former military housing that had been (roughly) converted to civilian housing when the military moved out. We had constant issues with the power; brownouts, sparking outlets, etc. It came to head when I was a teenager and my oldest brother helped me build my first PC.
Less than a month later it literally caught fire while powered off.
My folks bought a little basic outlet tester, which cheerfully showed that absolutely none of our outlets were grounded. They hired an electrician who came in to take a look at everything (because there was only one power company on the island, which therefore couldn’t be bothered to do things like address customer issues). After poking around, she came back to my folks with a somber look on her face and told them the ground line for the house was just hanging in the air, entirely disconnected from anything. She said she was frankly surprised our home hadn’t burned down years ago.
After she fixed it, we suddenly no longer had so many power issues. Go figure.
I live in an old house and water sips through the walls when the drain gets clogged… I live alone now, I think I will never forget the day part of the ceiling fell down… so fucking scared, angry and dissapointed in myself for not taking care of the place.
Just… chef’s kiss. Incredible. I love this.
An ex of mine lived in two extremely shoddy skyscrapers, and there’s a lot of stories I could tell, but I think the one that fits the most is that since no-one in the first skyscraper spoke German, the newspaper deliverer would just put all 80 newspapers in the foyer, and since no-one would ever take them, the janitor would… simply… open the door to the emergency stairs and throw the papers in.
By the time I had to use the emergency stairs to evade the landlord, there was a soft paper floor several centimeters thick on the ground. One spark and that building just… goes woosh.