bktheirregular

They got the repairs and renovation done in time. My bedroom is still choked with plaster dust, sawdust, and paint and varnish fumes from the rest of the apartment (that was the one room that didn't need any work done, other than securing a loose electrical outlet on one wall), and I've still got to sort out the stuff that got moved out of the living room and tossed aside...

...but my living-room floor is shiny and uniformly new-looking and gleaming under the protective clear-coat (honestly, you'd need to already know where the parquet got ripped up to see the dividing line now), the front wall no longer shows scarring from the repair work.

Also, the new bathroom fixtures are all in place - not just that, but the thirty-year-old tiles under four coats of paint got ripped out and replaced with new tiles on walls and floor, the electricals were redone so I no longer have to plug my washing machine into an outlet outside the bathroom door (preventing me from closing the bathroom door while doing laundry, which would lead to a pretty awful racket whenever the thing went into its spin cycle), I've got enough storage space for things to be tucked out of the way, and the bathroom no longer looks like it was pieced together like a mismatched jigsaw puzzle.

It's not perfect, of course - the new tile on the floor means that the bathroom door no longer clears, and I've got to put a shoulder into it to open or close it, but the workmen can plane off a bit on the bottom - and I've got to get a new shower curtain rod - but all in all, not bad.

They also finally painted the walls to the hallway that had been ripped up when that got its tile floor put in, and (apparently as a result of a problem with a pipe right on the edge of its end of life) the kitchen got repainted as well, and a messy patch that had been done when I first moved in (the original bathroom sink had to be pulled to make room for the washing machine, and a support strut had made a mess of the wall between the bathroom and the kitchen, leading to a temporary, cracked plaster patch in the kitchen wall) got repaired, finally.

(Apparently they had to rip up some kitchen tiling to repair/replace the pipe. I'm afraid to learn the details.)

There's still a lot of reorganizing to be done, but somehow, even after losing last Saturday and Sunday, they got the jobs done.

I've got enough trouble translating from Greek to English and vice versa without also having to translate to and from lolcat.

Floor guy wrapped up the job Saturday, so the weekend got taken up with cleaning up and putting furniture back into place.

Well, the job's not finished finished - all the new wood's down, but it's unfinished wood, which needs to be sanded down to the level of the old wood - and the old wood has to be sanded clean so the entire floor can be refinished, which is going to be a headache and a half, and require me to be out of the house for several days while the new coating on the floor dries. This will probably be concurrent with re-painting the walls, which will be done alongside remodeling the bathroom, which is the one bit of renovation that got postponed when I moved into the apartment.

But in the meantime, instead of a disaster area with a gaping hole in the floor, I've got an actual living space again.

yay.

"Greek time", they call it. Not quite the same sort of philosophy as "time is relative, lunch-time doubly so", but sometimes it can be more than a bit annoying. Get called into a meeting which is announced as not taking more than fifteen or twenty minutes, still stuck there an hour later. Cabinet-maker says he'll be there with bells on, and a week later, no sign of him, leaving painters and other workers hanging because they're waiting on the guy who's blown off the job.

Sometimes, though, it's just that fate intervenes. Like the workers who were supposed to be fixing the leak in my apartment. The timing was "as soon as we get finished with this other job", only the other job got more complicated, and they had to rent scaffolding or something, paying for it by the day, so they can't leave it in the middle to come over to my place to fix my walls. And naturally we can't call in the flooring people to put in new wood to patch the three-by-four-foot hole that got ripped in my parquet until the leak's plugged and the walls are patched.

Some of the people around me are hopeful that the flooring will shrink back to normal once the dry season gets into gear. I'm not so optimistic - and I'm worried that a good third of my living-room parquet may need replacing.

Minor problems, all things considered, I know.

Plumber and engineer came by early this morning, and between them determined that the water wasn't getting into the apartment from the roof, but rather, from a badly-designed little nook between my balcony and the next-door building. Instead of the water draining into a rain gutter right next to the nook, it infiltrated the walls and saturated my flooring.

Which means that not only does the flooring have to be replaced for about a third of my living room, but they've got to rip open a couple of walls to do ... I don't know. Re-plastering?

Headache still incoming.

On the one hand, the rain's good for my plants.

On the other hand, there's that leak in the roof through which the water gets into the walls, and into the floorboards.

On the other other hand, maybe if there's rain, it'll reveal the points where the water's leaking into the apartment.

On the other other other hand ... I'm out of hands.

I am so not looking forward to going home to my apartment after work today. One corner of my living-room floor has been torn up, revealing three layers of water-damaged wood - the parquet, which wasn't glued into place but rather nailed down, and below that some planks to nail the parquet to, and beams to distribute the load of the planks, and below that the concrete of the building structure.

Over in that corner, the concrete's been exposed.

And it's going to have to stay like that for a week and a half, to dry out before an engineer can test where the water's getting into the walls. Oy, the walls. I'm scared to see how much damage has been done to them.

And repairs to the torn-up floor? I shudder to think. The parquet and substructure in that corner are unsalvageable - the plumber was going at them with a chisel and sledge.

I wouldn't be surprised if the repairs take a month or more.

Last month I noticed that the floor in my apartment's living room felt slightly uneven. I didn't pay it much heed, figuring: old building, maybe slightly quirky.

It got worse. Gradually, mind, but noticeable as time went on ... to the point where this past weekend, there was a visible bulge in the floor near the door to the balcony. And that door, set in the wall about an inch off the floor, actually hit the floor when opened halfway.

Obviously, this needed a look-see from someone who knows more about structural engineering than me. After some adventures - the guy called me at 4pm to say he wanted to meet at 7pm, or earlier if I could make it (7pm was pushing it for me), and then I got hit with surprise work which kept me in the office until quarter of 7, leaving me racing to get home in time - I got the initial diagnosis.

Water in the walls. Bad enough that it had apparently caused visible damage to the trim where the wall met the floor. Could be a leaky water pipe, or a leaky rain-gutter drain, they don't know. It looks like they may have to rip up the walls to find out what the story is. And maybe also the nice parquet flooring that I got with the apartment.

Who knows how much this is going to cost, or how long it's going to take.

*sigh* I guess that's why I've been saving up money bit by bit.

The burned-out stuff is gone from Panepistimiou Street this morning. The fire-gutted Jeep has been hauled away. Windows still show fractures from stones, and facades and steps still are ragged where the hooligans smashed them to get ammunition to throw at the riot cops.

The downside of living here.

Got home safe, evacuating at about four-thirty in the afternoon, but the air was still saturated with tear gas. Burned the sinuses. But the violence seemed confined to Panepistimiou Street (maybe with a little on Stadiou, one block west; I didn't go to check, just made a beeline for home). Two blocks east, all was calm as I went by, and by the time I got to my place on Embassy Row, the only signs that all might not be well were the overflowing dumpsters from the trash-haulers' strike.

Gah. Sounds depressing.

But hey. I've got a job involving some stuff which can be interesting, I've got a roof over my head with no debts attached ... although apparently my balcony's causing problems for the guy living below me - so tonight I've got to get someone to look at the balcony, maybe see if the tiles are properly sealed or something. Still, it's better than the old place, where my ceiling was the leaky one, and I had to deal with the roach infestation, even if it was in an upscale neighborhood. (There are disadvantages to living right over a grocery store.)

Things are calmer today out in the street. People at the office are complaining about the cold; I, being used to New York winters, didn't realize that 45 degrees qualified as hideously cold.

So I've got this small balcony off my bedroom, with a shed-cabinet-thing, about three feet tall and four wide and three deep, with a double door that won't latch closed. And apparently word's gotten out to the local pigeon community that the shed would make a nice nesting place. This despite my having disposed of one nest already.

As a newcomer to fending off wildlife ... how would you go about dissuading pigeons? (Bearing in mind that I may not have the resources in Athens that one would have stateside, and also that I don't have any guns to shoot them with.)

Closing for the new apartment is Friday.

wibble