Well, this is a problem

[dorchadas]

A couple of weeks ago, sashagee noticed a bit of water and something on the wall in the office, in between the tv cabinet and my computer desk. Checking it I found a slime mold and some seeping at the bottom of the baseboard, so I cleaned off the wall and disinfected it with vinegar and kept a watch on it. The timing was odd--we only noticed it after the big spring thaw and it seemed to happen more after rain, but it also seemed to happen after we did our laundry or or our downstairs neighbor did his laundry, which was the weird thing. After a bit of back-and-forth with the housing association, who insisted that a licensed plumber come check out the problem, I hired a plumber, he came by yesterday, and to jump straight to the good part:

The problem turned out to be the cold-water common line serving all four floors' laundry units, which explains why there seemed to be more leakage when my downstairs neighbor was doing laundry even when gravity exists. That's "good," because it means that it's the responsibility of the association to pay for the costs rather than me--even though they refused to do anything until I hired a plumber myself to check it out. Things were more dangerous than they seemed originally, though, since while originally the leak was a slow drip it turned into a spray when the plumber removed some of the wood around the piping--apparently the wood was the only thing keeping the pipe together. We had to perform an emergency water shutoff for a few hours while the plumber fixed the pipe together, and here we are. He's back here today working on it again and then I'll just need to get the association to fix the wall and move my washer/dryer back into place and hook it up again.

I didn't get any reports of complaints during the night and I didn't see anything, so there weren't any leaks. And the water disruption wouldn't have been necessary if we had been able to get into the room with the control valves, but the door lock was broken and none of the keys the property manager got me worked. And none of this would have happened at all if the piping was installed correctly the first time--copper piping is supposed to last decades and this failed after fifteen years. And now we have to go to the laundromat down the street, which I haven't had to do since I lived in Japan. But on the plus side, we didn't flood any of our downstairs neighbors' homes, and that's a blessing!

Definitely hard to clean for Pesach with a hole in the wall, though.

Comments

[dorchadas]

Definitely good to do it now! But now we need to close up the hole in the wall, repaint the laundry cabinet, move the laundry machines back into it...a lot of work to be done, but at least without worrying about flooding!