We rent our house. Like in many other parts of the world, here, landlords don’t care so much about repairs being made to the residences they own if they’re not currently living in them.
True enough, there’s a stipulation in our lease contract that so many rupees of repairs each month, with a limit for the year, are to be undertaken by us.
Thing is, this house is in need of serious repairs past the point of what our contract allows for.
Let’s start with the bathrooms. Every single bathroom in this place has needed repairs of one description or another, and every single toilet has needed repairs.
The bottom downstairs bathroom has the old style plunger thingy that’s attached to the water thingie by a plastic cord. The plumber tried, and failed, to fix it, so we had to lift up the tank cover and manually pull it when we wanted to flush. Fahim, however, found a working solution so how we can pull the metal thingie on the top of the tank cover without having to move a thing.
However. It’s not fixed perfect – not Fahim’s fault, given how old that toilet fixture is and the poor design of the thing. We get water overflow, so we have to turn off the water supply to the toilet when we’re not there. Otherwise, well, our water bill will easily multiply.
Various taps and whatnot in that shower also don’t work, but the shower itself does. (Why the extra taps and whatnot? Probably to fill the bottom for a child’s bath. Or to fill buckets, I imagine. Something like that.)
The bathroom in the little upstairs bedroom (it’s funny how I think of these rooms in terms of my sister, niece, and nephew, if only because they occupied them for a period of time. 😀 This room is my nephew’s room.) The shower tap exploded one day, and we couldn’t turn it off. Fahim ended up having to shove a stick, with fabric wrapped around it, to stop the water flow.
What’s even worse is that when the water flowed, it soaked through the wall and dripped, or rather, flowed, onto the floor below. Um, yeah. That wasn’t properly waterproofed properly by any stretch.
The other big bedroom’s bathroom upstairs also had problems with water coming in from the water tank parked just above it on the roof. It was leaking like a sieve and looked like it was going to cause the roof to cave in. Even though the water tank has now been fixed, it still leaks, albeit a lot less.
The servant’s bathroom is not fixed, nor is it in use. In fact, we had to turn off the water to that bathroom because the leak, ahem, spray, ahem, flood, was that bad.
And then we have leaks in the roof.
Upstairs balcony – roof is rotted through and water comes down in a torrent. Thankfully, that’s outside, so it lands in the balcony and then drains out by the three intelligently placed drains. Thank heavens for those!
Our bedroom has a leak. Puddles a couple of feet in diameter form in bad rains. At least it’s not that bad.
We have a leak in our laundry/servant’s kitchen/stairwell area back there. No puddles form that I’ve seen, but the walls are wet to the point of mold and mildew growing. I wonder about the structural integrity of those walls.
And now, to the worst leak of them all. The one in our living room.
Last night, it started to rain (and thunder and lightning, too, by the way) just as I was going to go upstairs for bed. The water started pouring through the roof into our living room.
So, I grabbed our four buckets (yep, we have four buckets. Two were originally for water storage for water outages, but now we have a tank on the roof for that purpose) and put them down.
By that point, there was already enough water on the floor to form a puddle four or five feet wide. And growing.
This morning, I check buckets (which I’m leaving there, except for emptying, of course) and we’ve collected a good 20 or 40 litres. Hey, what can I say? I’m terrible at estimating volumes of water at largish quantities. :p
And the drapes have absorbed a lot of water, as has the carpet.
Which now smells like a dead rat.
So much does it smell like a dead rat that I went outside to see if there was, in fact, a dead rat. There wasn’t, and moreover, it smelled nice out there. No smell in the kitchen, or upper sitting room, or anywhere else other than the living room.
I check the carpet, and yep, it’s soaked, and yep, it’s definitely what smells like a dead rat.
How very nice. [/sarcasm]
