apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Count your blessings if you can get it all taken care of this week - we had a similar thing happen in the bathroom of our old apartment, and it took the management company from October until Febrauary to patch up the huge hole in the wall. At our new place, a leak caused part of the ceiling in our bathroom to fall in on the day that we moved in in June, and although we've been nagging our landlord about fixing it every week all summer, it only just got repared last week. Maybe we just have bad luck with bathrooms, but a one week turn around seems amazingly fast!

I don't want to dismiss your predicament, but be thankful that your LL and plumber were WAY more on top of this than mine were.

I had the same thing happen once and the pipe was accessed through my living room wall. It took close to two weeks from initial visit to having the wall back up. They did not cover the hole, so I had to clean the dust up almost daily. On day two I put up tarps in the LR doorways (of which there were FOUR) in order to minimize the dust in the rest of the apartment.

One particularly bright spot was when I called my landlord to find out if the plumbers had come by that day while I was at work. I didn't think so, as there didn't seem to be any change to the status of the project, but I wanted to check. When I called to ask, she screamed at me, "They were there! They just didn't have the right parts! They'll fix it soon!" I finally got a word in edgewise to explain that I was just checking because I didn't see that anything had changed. She calmed down after that, but it was still pretty disturbing.

The strangest thing was, when I sent her a letter terminating my tenancy-at-will, she called very concerned about why I was leaving. She wanted to know if there was a problem with the apartment. I explained I was moving to another state due to a job change she wished me good luck.

So here's to your extremely competent landlord and his/her efforts.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hmreiser/sets/72157606094423033/

My mother was livid after a ham-handed plumber cut jagged holes in her cabinets. She's handy enough that she could have done a neater job herself.

We need to have some wet insulation removed, so our apt. people will be chopping up our walls. While I'm thankful we didn't have any other damage from the hurricane, I've had all the furniture pushed to one side of the apartment for weeks and we have no clue when it's supposed to be done. Wish they'd give us a clue.

But clearly, I'm not still bitter about it! ;)

October to February is an unconscionably long time. You're more patient than I--I would have been withholding rent pending repairs by December! Yikes.

Oh, me neither, hmr, not bitter at all!

Withholding rent never gets you anything except a 5-day eviction notice....the best way to get action is to threaten to talk to the city or the health department...or the newspaper...and then give them a reasonable deadline.

It took my old landlord 4 months to paint our patio. Our whole building was being painted (exterior) and we were told to clear off our very large patio. The letter was given 1 week before the work was supposed to commence on our floor. It took the painters 4 months to finally finish the job.
We lived with our bbq, an antique cocacola cooler, and our patio furniture in our living room for an entire summer.
It sucked.

I'd say you're lucky to have it done so quickly.. However, don't count your chickens before they hatch!!

Yeah, it's unfortunate about the work, but you're really lucky it's moving so quickly. At my office, we deal with a lot of water leaks (non-plumbing types), and some of them take years to fix.

Also, in college, an entire section of ceiling plaster fell in my bedroom in the middle of the night due to a leaky roof (in February). When they finally managed to fix it (in June), they didn't cover any of my furniture and it all got paint splattered.

Two years ago, in a different apt, my landlords decided to install central heating after I had moved in. It was supposed to be done within 2 weeks of my moving in and take 4 days. They started 2 months after I moved in and it took 6 weeks. They provided no drop cloths, never cleaned up (including fast food wrappers), and left our doors unlocked daily. This whole process also resulted in my bike being stolen, as well as one of the subcontractors making a copy of our spare key. They then let themselves in a month after the work was completed and burglarized my apt.

So, lesson learned, have your locks changed after work is done in your place.

Gosh, these horror stories are awful!

i had an enormous disgusting hole in my bedroom ceiling from a leak. it took them a couple months to fix it; in the final weeks me harassing them days on end because i was losing my mind. i couldn't even use the bedroom the whole time because it was such a disaster area. i was sleeping on the sofa. at the end i was lucky that they even swept the floor after they were done. my livingroon also had similar issues... TWICE...both taking months each time to get fixed. landlords just don't give a shit.

I would love to get an update on the work! How did everything go? Or is it still going?