Part I: Disaster in the Bathroom

The ceiling caved in on my bathroom about a week ago. My friend had been staying there and she didn’t notice anything funny. I never got a call that there was something going on. Instead, on April 1st, I went to my apartment to do my taxes from home on my Quicken installed desktop. All was well when I left the house to go stay at my boyfriend’s house that evening.

Later that week, I come home and there is a note on the door dated April 2nd from the unit below mine. There’s water damage coming from my apartment and he wants to talk to my insurance company. Well I check the kitchen first since that was the source of some prior water problems when I first moved into my house 3+ years ago. Nope. Nothing. It’s dry as a bone.

Then I walk into the bathroom, and my jaw drops. I see the ceiling has caved in completely onto my toilet. Not good. I have a 2 foot square hole in the ceiling. There are about 3 layers of drywall and plaster fallen everywhere. I can tell that the floor has been soaked and dried up already because the bathmat has some staining on it and feels slightly damp, but isn’t wet.

Over the last week, I’ve been struggling to deal with it. I am now imposing myself on my boyfriend’s hospitality and it’s bugging the crap out of me. I really just want to be at my own house. I love my place, but this is a little too much for me. The landlady upstairs is taking care of the ceiling repair, but get this, there is another leak in the building that is still causing a problem!

Because of my asthma, I don’t clean up dusty stuff. I just avoid it and pay someone to do it. That’s always cheaper than an ER visit. My boyfriend did the clean up for me and while he was taking stuff to the dumpster, he left the toilet lid down and then I heard drips coming from the hole in the ceiling! YIKES! The leak was supposed to be fixed!

So now it’s being all referred back to the HOA to find the damage. It’s in multiple units and the origin is still not found.

At this point, I think the landlady upstairs will reimburse me for the ceiling repair for my unit, but I’m going to tear up the whole bathroom and remodel it just in case I want to rent it out. And if I’m going to do that, then I have some other things I’d like to do as well to the unit.

I’m going to have to stare at my cash flow for a while and figure some stuff out. UGH. Who needs this?

PS - I ran into Debt Hater this morning on the way to work!