Condo Law

When we got back from taking WB’s ashes to Ora, SC, I stuck my head into this closet pantry we have right under the stairs to the second floor of the condo and right adjacent to the kitchen.  And man—when I stuck my head in—did it stink.  We had been gone back to SC at least a couple of weeks between the end of regular school and the start of summer school, so I figured maybe I had left something in there, an onion or possibly a potato, that had gone bad.

 

pantry1

 

 

But I couldn’t find anything and when I started really looking I noticed that the wall of the little closet pantry was wet and covered with mold.  That’s what was stinking.  The damn mold.  So we took all our foodstuff that we had in the pantry closet—pasta and cans of stuff and rice and well just about everything we ate (except meat)–and put it all in cardboard boxes and piled them in the little corridor that runs from the main corridor to a little half bath.  The washer and the drier are in that little corridor.  So what with those and the boxes of food stuff it was hard to get to the little half bath and hard to get to the foodstuff too since it was all stacked on top of itself.

Finally, we figured out that while we had been gone there had been a major leak, more like explosion leak, in the closet outside our closet.  We have an end unit—our condo, I mean is an end unit—and at the end of our end unit is a communal closet that houses the water heaters for the whole building our little condo is part of.  So an explosion leak had occurred involving the water heater that had saturated the wall of the communal closet.  They fixed that, putting in new sheet rock.  But nobody had the sense to check to see if the sheetrock that was the wall of our pantry closet and was about four inches from the sheetrock they replaced had been damaged at all by the water explosion.

Man, what a mess.  I can’t explain condo law.  But because the explosion that saturated and ruined and molded up our wall was the result of a condo failure, the condo association had to replace the wall which meant the condo association did the hiring of the people to fix the wall and we consequently were at the mercy of the condo association to make sure the job was well and expeditiously done.  Well, I think it was well done, but it sure as hell wasn’t expeditious.  Damn, the repair drug clear into August what with people coming and going to do this and that.

 pantry2

 First, they had to dry out the wall.  I thought they would just knock it out, but no, because of the national mold scare, they insisted on drying it out just in case some of the mold might escape up the wall, mold apparently being very fast on its feet.  So they stuck this monstrous heat-a-lator thing in the closet that made a terrible racket and heated up the closet to about 120 degrees to kill off the mold.  And then there was this and then there was that and it just drug on and on getting the wall knocked down, getting it put back, getting it painted, getting a piece of carpet for the floor.

 

I was hoping to quiet down a bit and get some rest after the strenuous months before but, no, here I was teaching summer school—that was my mistake—and having to deal with the constant aggravation of people coming in and out of the condo at all manner of hours to fix that damn closet.

________________________________

Our renovated pantry closet is now the best organized closet in the entire condo.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*