Find someone who’s turning and you will come around

Posted on | 2 years, 11 months ago, mid-afternoon | No Comments

As we learned via mail notice yesterday, many of the things that drew us to our new apartment are about to change. Starting next week, the building’s owners will begin ripping out the steam heat (and the brand new boiler) in favor of tacky baseboard heaters; they’re going to be tearing up the walls to rewire the whole building’s electrical system; and next month, they’ll begin taking apart an entirely different set of walls in order to upgrade all the plumbing. We’ll be keeping the (soon to be useless) radiators because it “contributes to the charm of the place,” which is code for “we don’t want to tear up and repair the floors in order to extract them.” There’s a chance we’ll be losing that wonderful cast iron tub.

The building is 100 years old, and I’ll admit that the plumbing could stand a do-over; though we were assured upon moving in that the brand spanking new boiler (which I saw with my own two eyes) promised problem-free climate control for decades to come — and I’ll also admit that we didn’t think to ask about the electric system, due to the preponderance of modern outlets and appliances throughout the unit.

But we did ask a lot of questions before we moved in, and we were either misled or lied to outright — though there’s always the chance that the building manager (a resident) simply didn’t know about the bulk of it. For example, the Land Use Notice across the street is dated December 22, 2008 and we signed our lease weeks before then … so I doubt he was aware that a developer intends to level the buildings across the street and put up apartments and condominiums sometime in the near future. Given the kind of luck we have with such things, I predict that demolition and construction will probably begin … oh … right around the time a few months from now when construction/renovation is completed on this building. Just to make sure I don’t get any peace and quiet ever again.

We’re promised only a week or so of invasive demo/refurb on our individual units, though I likely will have no electricity during business hours on that “week or so” that they’re working, which will be a real hoot since I work from home — and since we have an occupied aquarium and a cat, and no safe place to store either one … so I’m expected to stick around and monitor the situation. Therefore, during the worst of things I’ll be sitting right here, just like I’m here today. And even on the weeks when it’s not our apartment up for shredding, I’m sure that — just like today — I’ll be sitting right here listening to the dulcet tones of reciprocating saws and hammers.

They started underneath us, in the apartment downstairs. It might as well be right beside my desk for all the racket.

As you might imagine, I’m none too happy about any of this. It might not be altogether out of line to say that I am, in fact, catastrophically depressed over the matter — given that we just exhausted our finances in order to move out of a StructuralFail! apartment barely one month ago, and we’re in no position to move again. So please, please, please don’t email me with outrage on my behalf, telling me that we have grounds to leave the lease and go somewhere else, because even if you’re right, we simply don’t have the money to do it again. In fact, I think I’m going to disallow commenting both here and on LJ on general principle. I love you guys, but I really don’t want to spend the next few hours defending our inability to escape.

There are other factors contributing to my simmering rage, but they don’t really bear unpacking here.

Suffice it to say, we’re here for awhile, and it isn’t going to be very nice. It will be several months before all the renovations are finished (if we’re lucky), and then we can reasonably expect the joys and delights of demolition and construction about twenty yards away for an indefinite period of time.

Goddamn. I really wanted to love this place.

Category: misc

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