The seamy underbelly (make that overbelly) of rent-controlled apartments

Close to the end of March, I noticed part of the ceiling in my bathroom was sagging a little bit. "Huh," I thought, and decided to ignore it until it got worse.

It was pouring rain on March 31st, and it got worse. All of a sudden, water started pouring through a hole that had developed at the lowest point of the sag. Eventually, it abated, I put a bucket on the counter under the hole, and with a little mopping (actually, a lot of mopping), I was able to get the bathroom back close to its normal state. I went down to the apartment office and filled out a "Maintenance Request Form."

March 31st was a Sunday (and Easter). A maintenance person apparently came by on Monday while I was out of the apartment, and as far as I can tell, all he or she did is poke a finger into the hole, thus making it a little bigger.

And within a few days, the water stopped coming. It was mostly dry during April and most of May, but water started dripping out of the hole in late May. (This was very mysterious, since it pretty much hadn't rained at all since March 31st.) In mid-June, I filled out another Maintenance Request Form. As far as I could tell, no "maintenance" was done. The water kept dripping, with as much as three gallons worth of drips landing in the bucket every 24 hours.

Today, I came home from work to discover that the ceiling had collapsed, judging by the 2-foot by 1-foot piece of ceiling that was lying in the sink, and the other pieces that were scattered about.

I went downstairs to the apartment office, told the manager what had happened, and filled out yet another Maintenance Request Form. They're big on paperwork. Anyway, the manager promised to page the maintenance man.

He showed up about 15 minutes later, took one look at the bathroom ceiling and said, "Well, it's the air conditioner." Had this been an educational program for children, I would have said, "Of course! It all makes sense now. The water that broke through the ceiling on March 31st was left over from when the air conditioning system had been run previously, either from the winter when I was using it for heat, or from way last summer. Then it didn't start dripping again until I started running the air conditioner again, and the hotter it got, the more the air conditioner was running, and that's why it was dripping more in July than it was in May."

I didn't say that, though, but the maintenance man left for about 15 minutes to go up on the roof and fiddle around with something, then came back and said he'd fixed it temporarily but the air conditioning guy would come at some point, and then he would come back next Wednesday to see if it had dried enough for him to fix the ceiling.

But for the time being, there's a gaping hole in my bathroom ceiling, offering a beautiful view of wet insulation, ringed by torn pieces of some vinyl-type material, formerly the bottom layer of the ceiling, that are hanging down. It looks like this...


The good news is that Chessie the cat seemed nonplussed by the incident.