Home Maintenance and the Common Man

I like to think that I keep my apartment in pretty good shape. The living room is always relatively clean, the dishes are never in the sink longer than 3 days and the kitchen has its weekly date with the bleach.

I'm now on my second lease and I've never had any homeowner problems, bodily invading ants excluded. Then last week my roommate, La Sister, tells me that the ceiling above her shower is leaking. This happened once before during my first month and it was fixed pretty quickly, so I didn't think about it very much at all, not realizing that it was the first precursor of housing doom.

Three days later, I'm doing the dishes and I turn on the garbage disposal. It goes, "Uh, whir," and then refuses to ever work again. This is quickly followed by: the blowing out of two wall sockets, a near complete loss of water pressure in the bathroom and then kitchen sinks, and the sporadic disconnection of my phone service.

Suddenly I'm living all hand to mouth like some sort of savage, with almost no water, no way to dispose of food and limited access to electricity and phones. I mean, I had to plug my glowing picture of the Madonna in an entirely different place! And don't even get me started on shaving with sub-par water pressure. When did it become the 19th century around here?

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All that being said, so I get back from grocery shopping today, and begin the whole kitchen cleaning and unpacking process. This is always a fun time because I get the grocery shopping buyer's remorse that only I can get, I mean seriously, what exactly did I buy all that rice and chicken for? You know I'm gonna get home, take one look in the fridge and then either A) call for pizza or B) run down the street to Taco Bell. Complicated cooking and defrosting? I have one skillet and one 1 quart pot. Why am I so idealistic when I go shopping?

Ugh. So everything is packed away, the dishes are at least marginally done, in that they may not all be completely clean, but in their current state they can remain for at least 48 more hours without serious injury to any party nor threat of emergent intelligence developing within the sink in my absence. I collect all the empty plastic bags that are slowing rolling throughout my apartment like so many tumbleweeds and head over to the trash room to dispose of them properly (read: put them in the big A&F shopping bag with the countless thousands of other ones, part of the strange collecting empty plastic grocery bags behavior that I picked up from my parents. I have no idea why I do it, but I can't stop.)

I open the door to the trash room...and it's like a scene from, a horror movie.

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Two summers ago, I took a summer job as an office assistant at a summer camp. (And the award for most use of the word 'summer' in a single sentence goes to me. I'd like to thank all the little people.) It was seriously the most interesting job I've ever had and made me appreciate so many of the little things in the world, like sleeping in a bed that is not 80% outdoors and entirely free of scorpions.

My home for the summer was in a cabin as a defacto counselor to the 17 year old boys who were counselors-in-training. It was one of the nicer setups, in that I got a real bed and there was a shower/bathroom attached to my cabin. Practical luxury in that place. The only thing was, in the bathroom there was a medicine cabinet.

And if you opened that medicine cabinet, you exposed the Doorway to Hell. It was full of rotten wood, mold, mildew, ants, and demon spawn, just to name a few of the horrors that awaited the hapless campgoer that dared to look inside. Picture that scene from the first Ghostbusters in Sigourney Weaver's fridge, only scary. It was enough to terrify me away from the bathroom for the rest of the summer, preferring the communal one across the camp that was always full of spiders, in comparison.

That was absolutely nothing.

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I drop the empty grocery bags in horror. The trash room is normally home to: my ironing board, the trashcan, and any bags of trash, empty pizza boxes etc, that have built up over the week. Instead, I find a huge pile of broken plywood, plaster, particle board and lord knows what else. And it is...I don't know. I joked earlier that I was staving off intelligence in my dirty dishes. I would not put it past the mold cultures on that blackened, soggy plywood to already be a published author somewhere. I mean, it was advanced.

Apparently, the water heater (which also lives in the trash room) has slowly been leaking, oh since The Dawn of Time, and has saturated the ledge that it lives on. While the actual platform remains intact, the lower particle board/plywood combo that was the underpinning decided that while I was out getting groceries was the best time to collapse in spectacular fashion and allow its Mold Developed Overlords access to the outside world.

While at mostly a loss, I manage to douse the entire room in bleach and antibacterial whatnots, ignoring the tiny shrill shrieks of "I'm meeelting, meeeeeeeltinggggg," coming from said Overlords and get the larger pieces into a trashbag. But I have to keep the pieces until the maintenance guy gets here tomorrow so that he can do some exploration and comparison to make sure the process is not far more insidious than I imagine and that none of the cultures survived and are now hiding in the wallspace, authoring the next National Book Award winner.

Because, damn it, I do not need the competition.