Friday, January 2, 2009

The Ownership Society Can Suck It

Man, do I miss getting indignant about some apartment problem and bitching to the landlord.

"Oh, he's fixing that shit. I don't care if it is six in the morning, I'm calling that slumlord right goddamn now. Expecting us to live like this - I hope he's not expecting my rent check this month. I don't care if I have to call 8 On Your Side, the newspaper and the mayor, this shit's getting fixed. I know it's just the refrigerator light bulb, but that shit's dangerous!"

Now that I'm a homeowner who probably had something to do with that whole financial meltdown, I have to fix that stuff myself, which isn't as much fun.

For the past month or so I'd hear this weird popping sound when I stepped out of the bathtub. I also noticed that the caulk around the tub kept cracking.

When I notice something like that, my first response is to ignore it and hope it goes away while at the same time freaking out, thinking of the worst possible scenario then multiplying it by a factor of ten or so.

I became convinced that the subfloor was rotten. So much so that I could swear I could feel the bathtub moving under my feet, just knowing that soon I'd find myself crashing through the floor. It made me sort of dizzy.

So I finally got it checked it out. Turned out I was right. The subfloor had turned into a mushy paste. So we're redoing the bathroom.

Here's a picture of where the bathtub used to be. If you squint hard enough, you can see the radon, toxic mold and asbestos fumes creeping out, getting ready to kill us in our sleep.


Oh yeah, the plumbers also found a bone down there. They said it wasn't human, but I think they wanted to keep working without having to wait around for an exorcism.

I'm pretty sure these haunted bones have something to do with the cap gun and shirt I found stuffed up in the wall when replacing the floors. I also found a ton of oak leaves up in there, which I guess was an olde tyme insulation method if they couldn't find gasoline to douse our Thomas Edison wiring with.

The good news is that they're going to be finished ahead of schedule, so that soon I can take a shower in my own haunted bathroom without worrying about falling down that little gateway to hell the plumbers exposed.

3 comments:

Alonzo Mosley (FBI) said...

Shortly after we moved into our home, we decided to replace the large flat mirror in our bathroom with a medicine cabinet. When we removed the mirror, we could see that there had been a cabinet before and that the hole was patched over. When we removed the patch, we found about a hundred rusty razor blades in a pile.

It wasn't until later that I found out people used to have a slit in their cabinets to put old blades into so that they would just gather inside the wall. Kinda makes sense, but my mind really ran wild when I first saw those blades.

Miniowa said...

Found you through Pat Hughes. You"re a pretty funny guy. It's about -1235875412*F in Iowa. You"re a little burst of sunshine that just might help me survive. So, um... more posts please. Thanks in advance.

Michelle in Iowa

Unknown said...

Aw, thanks. I've been at a loss for stories lately, hopefully something will come up.

I had a co-worker go to Iowa for Christmas. The high was under 20. That sort of blew my mind.