And to think, I used to ~like~ rain....
Or, "No thanks, I do NOT want to live in The Great Denver Indoor Swamp."
We've had rain the past couple of weeks. Intermittent, with days of cool-but-no-precipitation, interspersed with bouts of real Donner-und-Blitzen soakers. Which is something I usually like, even beyond the fact that this is an arid climate and we've had several droughts in the past few years; the rain also ended a record-breaking heat streak for Denver, and that was a happy thing as well.
Also, a couple weeks back, I started to notice an odd... well, earthy smell whenever I was in my bedroom or using the computer. But since both my bed and my computer are near windows, and since I remember hearing a lot of lawn-working-type sounds through said windows, I figured maybe the complex had had the lawns aerated or fertilized or something.
Alas, such was not the case.
This past Friday night was another one of those Full Special Effects drenching downpours; I could hear the thunder even through the layers of wall and ceiling here at the office, and what really surprised me was that the worst of it was occuring after 1:00 am. (While we do get rain in the wee hours, the thunderstorms seem to stop well before midnight.)
All was fine and good, as I love rain and I love thunderstorms even more. And then, as I was engaging in my usual Saturday Ritual Sleep-in (I get home around dawn, and am a chronic insomniac, so I spend a good deal of each Saturday catching up on my missed sleep... with varying results.), I gradually awoke to a sound... one of those "Something, I don't know what exactly, is WRONG" kind of sounds. It was a constant, frequent, loud dripping sound. But since my window was open, I figured it was just from the still-going-on heavy rain, and tried to go back to sleep. But my subconscious would not let me sleep, it kept shaking my shoulder and yelling in my ear that "something is WRONG, dammit!!!" And as I listened to the dripping sound more carefully, I realized it had an odd... plastic sound to it, as though the water I was hearing was dripping onto a...
HOLY SHIT LIKE IT'S DRIPPING ON A PLASTIC BAG RIGHT HERE IN MY BEDROOM NEXT TO MY BED!!!!!!!
And sure enough, in a hole through the ceiling where the previous tenant had once hung a plant, there was a constant and steady drip-drip-drip of swampy-smelling water, dripping onto a plastic bag full of art supplies that I'd put next to the (now unused, as my current feline Resident Deity is also the World's Only Acrophobic Cat) cat tower in front of the window next to my bed, said cat tower which was also being soaked.
So I spent the rest of that day trying to dry up the mess, spreading papers all over the place to dry out, salvaging what I could of the affected art supplies, and sticking buckets to catch the water from the ceiling. I knew there had already been a problem, as the hallway right outside my front door had a large leak, but they weren't able to take care of it until the rain stopped, so I just dodged the industrial-sized plastic buckets stuck there to catch the deluge. But up until that morning, I hadn't had any problems in my apartment.
Over the rest of the weekend I discovered two more leaks -- one in the middle of my living room, right behind my computer area, and one actually inside the wall that separates my living room from my bedroom. The only sign of that one was the paint sagging halfway down the wall. But the leak in the living room ceiling left a big bulge of paint separating from the ceiling istelf where the water had accumulated before it finally broke through and leaked out into my apartment. It was also the last leak I discovered, just yesterday in fact -- it must have taken a while for enough water to accumulate to bulge the paint and then break through.
(Hey, it could be worse -- I found out from my next door neighbor, who is also on the maintenance crew, that some of the garden-level apartments actually full-out flooded. Joy.)
Oh yeah, and the smell. That's still there, too. The manager stopped by today to take a look at my ceiling leaks, and he told me what had happened. I was afraid that the roof itself was leaking, and indeed I heard footsteps overhead at various intervals throughout the weekend as people were up there checking, but it seems that the real culprit was one of the rooftop drains came unhooked from its drain pipe, and so all that water that should have been gushing nicely out onto the lawn all this past couple of weeks was instead emptying out INTO THE FRIKKIN ATTIC CRAWLSPACES!!!!!!! Most of it flowed down the inner walls into the garden level apartments, but a bunch of it pooled onto the ceiling, and taking the paths of least resistance, ended up IN MY APARTMENT.
Which explains that "earthy" smell I'd been getting, even before the water broke through my ceiling -- the water was up there all this time, soaking through. Well, the smell has gone from "earthy" to full-out swampy, and until I get everything thoroughly cleaned, it's a smell that's gonna stay for a while. Hell -- even that might not get rid of the smell, since the attic crawlspaces were soaked through, as was part of that wall between my living room and bedroom; there's no way to clean those places, short of tearing out the affected wood and rebuilding. So I may be stuck with a faintly moldy, swampish-sort of smell every time the humidity goes up, now.
Joy.
We've had rain the past couple of weeks. Intermittent, with days of cool-but-no-precipitation, interspersed with bouts of real Donner-und-Blitzen soakers. Which is something I usually like, even beyond the fact that this is an arid climate and we've had several droughts in the past few years; the rain also ended a record-breaking heat streak for Denver, and that was a happy thing as well.
Also, a couple weeks back, I started to notice an odd... well, earthy smell whenever I was in my bedroom or using the computer. But since both my bed and my computer are near windows, and since I remember hearing a lot of lawn-working-type sounds through said windows, I figured maybe the complex had had the lawns aerated or fertilized or something.
Alas, such was not the case.
This past Friday night was another one of those Full Special Effects drenching downpours; I could hear the thunder even through the layers of wall and ceiling here at the office, and what really surprised me was that the worst of it was occuring after 1:00 am. (While we do get rain in the wee hours, the thunderstorms seem to stop well before midnight.)
All was fine and good, as I love rain and I love thunderstorms even more. And then, as I was engaging in my usual Saturday Ritual Sleep-in (I get home around dawn, and am a chronic insomniac, so I spend a good deal of each Saturday catching up on my missed sleep... with varying results.), I gradually awoke to a sound... one of those "Something, I don't know what exactly, is WRONG" kind of sounds. It was a constant, frequent, loud dripping sound. But since my window was open, I figured it was just from the still-going-on heavy rain, and tried to go back to sleep. But my subconscious would not let me sleep, it kept shaking my shoulder and yelling in my ear that "something is WRONG, dammit!!!" And as I listened to the dripping sound more carefully, I realized it had an odd... plastic sound to it, as though the water I was hearing was dripping onto a...
HOLY SHIT LIKE IT'S DRIPPING ON A PLASTIC BAG RIGHT HERE IN MY BEDROOM NEXT TO MY BED!!!!!!!
And sure enough, in a hole through the ceiling where the previous tenant had once hung a plant, there was a constant and steady drip-drip-drip of swampy-smelling water, dripping onto a plastic bag full of art supplies that I'd put next to the (now unused, as my current feline Resident Deity is also the World's Only Acrophobic Cat) cat tower in front of the window next to my bed, said cat tower which was also being soaked.
So I spent the rest of that day trying to dry up the mess, spreading papers all over the place to dry out, salvaging what I could of the affected art supplies, and sticking buckets to catch the water from the ceiling. I knew there had already been a problem, as the hallway right outside my front door had a large leak, but they weren't able to take care of it until the rain stopped, so I just dodged the industrial-sized plastic buckets stuck there to catch the deluge. But up until that morning, I hadn't had any problems in my apartment.
Over the rest of the weekend I discovered two more leaks -- one in the middle of my living room, right behind my computer area, and one actually inside the wall that separates my living room from my bedroom. The only sign of that one was the paint sagging halfway down the wall. But the leak in the living room ceiling left a big bulge of paint separating from the ceiling istelf where the water had accumulated before it finally broke through and leaked out into my apartment. It was also the last leak I discovered, just yesterday in fact -- it must have taken a while for enough water to accumulate to bulge the paint and then break through.
(Hey, it could be worse -- I found out from my next door neighbor, who is also on the maintenance crew, that some of the garden-level apartments actually full-out flooded. Joy.)
Oh yeah, and the smell. That's still there, too. The manager stopped by today to take a look at my ceiling leaks, and he told me what had happened. I was afraid that the roof itself was leaking, and indeed I heard footsteps overhead at various intervals throughout the weekend as people were up there checking, but it seems that the real culprit was one of the rooftop drains came unhooked from its drain pipe, and so all that water that should have been gushing nicely out onto the lawn all this past couple of weeks was instead emptying out INTO THE FRIKKIN ATTIC CRAWLSPACES!!!!!!! Most of it flowed down the inner walls into the garden level apartments, but a bunch of it pooled onto the ceiling, and taking the paths of least resistance, ended up IN MY APARTMENT.
Which explains that "earthy" smell I'd been getting, even before the water broke through my ceiling -- the water was up there all this time, soaking through. Well, the smell has gone from "earthy" to full-out swampy, and until I get everything thoroughly cleaned, it's a smell that's gonna stay for a while. Hell -- even that might not get rid of the smell, since the attic crawlspaces were soaked through, as was part of that wall between my living room and bedroom; there's no way to clean those places, short of tearing out the affected wood and rebuilding. So I may be stuck with a faintly moldy, swampish-sort of smell every time the humidity goes up, now.
Joy.