It Gets Worse
Got home from work (no note on the door) and was in my bedroom changing clothes when I heard water running.
This. Is. Not. Good.
Go to the kitchen. The towels beneath the wound in the wall were soaked. There was water running down the side of the cabinet splattering all over the counter and down the back of the wall behind the oven. The burners on the stove were marinating in brown water.
I was pissed. I cleaned up all that and climbed up to address the wall. There was a steady stream of water coming out.
I ripped off the paint and layers of sheetrock that came with it. More brown ooze and soggy, smelly sheetrock.
I called the building manager. "Marc, this is Amanda. I have water, lots of water, coming from what is now a hole in the wall." Rrgh. That's not what a landlord wants to hear at 6:30 on a Friday night. "I'll be over in like ten minutes."
When he arrives, he takes one look and says, "Ohhh shit."
He climbs up and feels the wall, then proceeds to make a fist and punch it clear through the wall. Huge chunks of soggy wall come glopping down. "Are you going to be here tonight?" he asks. "This is going to take a while."
Oi vay. Did it ever.
Poor bastard, it was his birthday too.
Thank goodness Bill was home because it took several trips back and forth to identify where the leak was coming from. At one point, John (the building manager's friend) and I were standing in the kitchen holding trash cans beneath a waterfall coming out of my ceiling.
Marc (the building manager called his plumber pal Jonnie to rescue us). So John took off and we waited for Jonnie to arrive.
I learned all about Marc and his wife Jill, the buildings he manages, and how he and Jonnie once spent three hours trying to find a leak in some woman's radiator. It wasn't until after they got stoned and sat down to stare at the radiator pipes that they found it.
Interestingly, he lived in Whitefish Bay for a while, his sister attended the U of M, and his aunt and uncle live in Duluth. Jill was kind of pissed that he missed his 36th birthday dinner, but she'll get over it.
Luckily, between Jonnie and Marc, they found the leak. There was a hole in a pipe beneath the floorboards under Bill's kitchen sink.
So, now I have a big, smelly three foot hole in my kitchen ceiling and wall. And sometime this week Nick, the contractor, (who that morning diagnosed I had a leak) will come to fix it.
Meanwhile, I wish I had a DeWalt sawsall that I could use to cut back the soggy sheetrock. That stuff doesn't dry out, and I know that Nick will just cover it up and let the wet stuff rot and grow moldy inside the wall.
Sawsalls are mighty expensive, but maybe I could go to the hardware store (where they know me by name) and get a sturdy utility knife. It reminds me of Cheers, only I'm Norm and the bar is the hardware store. "Hey! Amanda!" and instead of raising a glass, they greet me by raising the pencil behind their ear.
Posted by Amanda at October 09, 2004 12:55 PM
