DivaStan – The Continuing Adventures

a.k.a. F*cking Tuesday

Time for a story, boys and girls!

Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then I’ll begin.

This morning, around 10:30, while sitting in my room watching television and sorting through the mess on the top of my dresser and listening to LibraryDiva as she rambled around preparing for a trip to the dentist and a day at work, I became aware of the sound of running water. I thought that perhaps LibraryDiva was letting a faucet run to get hot water…until she stuck her head into my room and asked me the following question:

“What’s that sound?”

We scampered around the apartment and discovered that this sudden distressing sound of cascading water was coming from the utility closet where the water heater and furnace are housed. After about two minutes of conversation during which we decide that we had never heard the water heater make this particular type of noise before and that perhaps this sound was in fact indicative of a potentially disastrous development I decided to wander toward the phone and place a call to the front office. I was informed that the gentleman who lives in the apartment directly below DivaStan had already placed an emergency call for maintenance due to the large amounts of water coming through the ceiling of his bathroom. (We, the residents of DivaStan, would like to take a moment to extent a sincere apology to the gentleman who lives in the apartment below us. We know that this is the third time since we moved in that we have effectively ‘flooded’ your home. We would, however, like to point out that each instance has in fact been the result of broken and/or damaged plumbing fixtures and is therefore no fault of our own.) By the time I was off the phone there was a maintenance guy standing in our hallway turning off our water in an attempt to stem the flow.

It was quickly established that simply turning off our water was not going to fix the problem so instead the water to the whole building was turned off (sorry neighbors!). While LibraryDiva frantically attempted to locate enough water to brush her teeth with I debated on spending the day at my parent’s house. The fuzzy punks were wrangled and LibraryDiva took off for parts unknown, and I decided to hang around DivaStan and watch the drama unfold.

While our humble forty gallon hot water heater was drained I gossiped with the maintenance guys and weaseled some info on our less than stellar parade of neighbors. Turns out that the guy in the apartment diagonal from us was evicted for reasons unknown, but that’s okay because he was pretty creepy. The guy in the apartment downstairs pulled a runner and took off when they pressed him about not paying the rent…and the girl who had been living with him offered to take over the lease…but first they had to go through the process of eviction and then when they ran her credit and discovered that it wasn’t good enough for her to keep the apartment on her own she took off too! Then came the tale of the girl in the 400 building who didn’t realize that the hose on the back of her washing machine had split and was pouring out gallons of water which soaked through her floor and flooded BOTH of the apartments below hers until her enraged neighbors beat down her front door and screamed at her!

Once the heater was empty the maintenance guy strong armed it out of the utility closet and took a sheet rock saw to the closet wall. The pre-existing small-ish hole was cut larger and larger until the source of the leak was located…a pin sized split in the main water line. A maintenance guy was dispatched to our local home repair store to purchase something called a “Shark Bite.” The line was repaired, the water heater was muscled back into place and reconnected and, though it looks like LibraryDiva and I will need to steam clean the hallway carpet again, the mess was really surprisingly minimal. (OH! And the maintenance guys were totally impressed by the multiple pieces of framed cross stitch LibraryDiva and I had hung in the hallway. They had never seen anything like it and were totally blown away to discover that it was our hobby. Yes, LibraryDiva and I are total dorks…but at least we embrace it.)