One Thing, Then Another, Then Another…
The sky may not be falling, but it sure is leaking.
See, the heating guy got here in a borrowed vehicle, bereft of most of his tools, and with a little help from me got our circulator pump running again. In a couple weeks he’ll be back to replace it with a smaller, more modern, efficient one that never needs oil added. And the other one. It turns out the pump for the 2nd floor apartment is far worse than ours, and it’s amazingly lucky for them it was not the one to freeze. The oil reservoir was full of rust sludge water, and the pump is the apparent source of the floor in the area sometimes being damp. So that got some oil (transmission fluid, courtesy of me) in it to keep it going too.
So heat’s back and all that, and we’re merrily warming up, debating whether I should go through fifteen feet of 25 or so inch deep snow now or in the morning to clear the dryer vent. Then the kitchen starts dribbling!
Water poured down the inside kitchen wall, opposite the outer wall where the sink and such are, in a line that made it look for all the world like the baseboard unit upstairs must have burst right above that spot. Deb quickly unplugged and moved things, minimizing the damage. The wall is pretty wet in places, most notably around the electrical outlets. The pair of built-in drawers in the wall that we use for things like cleaning supplies have sandy, sludgy standing water in them. It even leaked around the bedroom doorframe.
I called the landlord’s business, where his sister had left and he was with a customer, so I had to leave a message with an employee. Then I knocked on the door upstairs to see if Slacker Dude knew he was leaking and could shed light. He was checking the attic, where he had a leak once, when I went to the cellar to check there for signs of problems. It went all the way down to the cellar in about the same spot it was concentrated in our kitchen, leaving wet floor and puddles there.
I have yet to receive a call back from the landlord, but Slacker Dude established that what appears to have happened is he got a fork stuck in his garbage disposal, obstructing things so when the dishwasher ran it leaked under the sink, down under his floor, across the ceiling above us, and down the wall on the opposite side.
Great.
Luckily it didn’t get the books stored in the built-in china cabinet on the other side of the wall. There’s some cleaning up and a lengthy wait for the wall to dry around the wiring, but nothing damaged in a “this will cost us” sort of way.
And having gone to the door of the upstairs apartment for the first time ever, now I know that the disgusting smell that sometimes infests the common areas is spillover from that apartment. Ugh.
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