Apartment Mess

Every day, I'm worried I'll get back to my apartment and the building will have collapsed. The kitchen floor slopes downward at, at least, a 20 degree angle, the door frames are strained and I'm pretty sure one day the oven is going to fall through the floor. Yes, I live in a "Pre-War" apartment that probably should have been bulldozed years ago.

While I had considered staying in the apartment for another year, mainly as a reaction to not wanting to move my stuff AGAIN, my decision was definitely made yesterday. I will not live in this apartment after September. I still don't know if I'll be leaving New York City, but I'll definitely be moving out of this place!

Yesterday morning, I was awakened by a "drip-drip-drip" sound. Since it has been raining for over a week (some days with some pretty strong storms), the sound of water isn't that unusual. Once I came closer to consciousness, I realized that the dripping sound was coming from INSIDE the apartment. I quickly got out of bed to determine what the problem was and it didn't take me long to find it - there was over an inch of yellow water on the bathroom floor. The water was coming through the ceiling in 4 different places. After calling the emergency maintenance line (who, by the way, aren't very nice!) someone finally came out to determine what the problem was. Apparently, the man living upstairs decided to do some laundry in his bathtub, overflowing the tub and bursting a pipe between the floors. Perfect.

After they stopped the water, I went to work after I was promised that someone would be coming by to clean up the standing water in our apartment. When I got back that night, no one had come to the apartment and I had a HUGE mess to clean up - I used basically every towel I owned to get the water up out of the floor, and then had to take all of the towels (plus 50 pounds of water) all to the laundromat to wash them.

To make matters worse, I got back to my apartment only to find my closet racks had collapsed - leaving all of my clothes in the floor. (sorry for the crappy camera phone picture, my camera was buried under the mess) I had to move all of my clothes into Carrie's room in order to get the hardware pieces out. Now, I have to figure out how to get my closet rack back up (or something back up) so that I can store my clothing! It's definitely going to be interesting, with no man in my life to play "handy man", I'll be doing it all by myself. I don't want to spend a lot of money fixing it, because I don't plan on living in this apartment in 4 months --- uggghhhhhhh I guess I'll be spending time at Home Depot this weekend...