I had a long-winded post about the next six months of our tragic saga at the Flats at Wheaton Station and then the last week or two happened. I'm scrapping that one and skipping to the good parts.
The apartment flooded again. Our kitchen sink started bubbling up again about six weeks ago. It wasn't our fault. The stuff coming through the drain was taco grease, bleachy suds, all kinds of things that we didn't put down the sink ourselves. One night it coated all of our baby dishes, requiring the first ever full sanitization from the meaty filth that covered everything. I used the same stuff I use to clean out my brewing equipment--basically a low-power OxyClean. It's entropy in a bottle.
We put in a maintenance request, asking the guy to call us before he entered the apartment so that we could come home and manage the dog and whatever. No call. I came home to a note on the door: "DOG NOT SECURE, PLZ RESCHEDULE WITH DOWNSTAIRS OFFICE." Carly was home the next day and set up another maintenance request, this time in all caps: "CALL US BEFORE YOU COME TO THE APARTMENT." No dice. Over the next few weeks we get cryptic messages about cleaning out the trap in the dishwasher, "EVERYTHING FINE." The sink belches more filth. We put in a more specific request. More cryptic messages. We are not hopeful.
The next Saturday, we roll down to Virginia for our friends' kid's third birthday party. There were many bouncy castles and cake and crap pizza (the Wolf ate it all). We retired to our friends' house to relax, drink water and hang out with everyone. We opened presents. The Wolf took a nap and when he was awake, he was the life of the party. Carly's phone rang with a call from a number we didn't recognize around 2:30PM.
Someone from our building management called and she seemed kind of rushed. Carly took the call in another room. The person explained that their people had to enter our apartment because there was water leaking from our apartment into their offices. The sink had backed up with the sink-diarrhea of all of the apartments above us. They had to tear up our carpet, there was an industrial fan in there, a guy would be over in a few days to patch it up and steam clean everything.
We took our sweet time going home. We drove the long way, got dinner, picked up some groceries. We waited until the Wolf was really tired so we could put him right to bed. The noise of the fan was likely going to be a problem. We were imagining his little fingers turned to steak tartare and planning our strategy for chairs and baby gates to block off the affected area. It went as planned. Strangely, the maintenance guys had already cleaned up the place such that it was hard to tell that it flooded, except for the massive fan blowing air under our carpet. A few days later a guy came and steam cleaned the whole apartment, as promised.
It was refreshing that they actually did what they said they would, but something felt odd. It appeared that the office only gave a shit about our maintenance issues when it affected them directly. We notified them of maintenance issues and warned them that it had happened before, and nothing got done. Water dripped into their office, they jumped to the occasion. It was clear that they only cared as far as it made their newly painted lobby look bad. The parallels to an abusive parent were glowing in my mind.
We started looking for a new apartment the day after the flood. We decided we wanted to get out of the huge apartment buildings and maybe find something with a yard or a little shared green space, at least. We found a few spots that were promising, and settled on a weird old townhouse built in the 60's. It had everything we wanted, but needs a little scrubbing and some paint. Small considerations in the grand scheme of things. We put in an application and a deposit, and it was all handshakes and plans to sign leases and sort out details. Then we went to Seattle.
I flew my mother in to take care of the Wolf for four days while Carly and I zipped off to Seattle for our friends' wedding. It was our first time away from the kid together. She'd been away from him for some business trips and other things, and I'd had a weekend or two away, but never together. This was going to be a good break. We gave Mom a short list of instructions and asked her to send photos. It was a snap. And it was! Ma loves the Wolf and they got along swimmingly. Strictly speaking, she needed the break and the time to spend with her grandson. Everything was peachy.
Then, about 7:30PM on Saturday, the fire alarms went off in our building. Mom and the Wolf had to run out through the Blitz in their bare feet to safety in the street. After about half an hour of wailing and grinding and shrieking alarms, the fire department reset everything, said "false alarm!" and everyone went back inside. Mom texted me. I told her that she should keep her shoes handy, because it could happen again. In our experience, the false alarms came in waves. And they did. The next set of false alarms started around 1:17AM and persisted in five- to ten-minute bleats until finally the fire department fixed it and went on their merry way. Ma couldn't sleep and just stayed up all night until the Wolf was ready for food and so on in the morning. Neither one of them really slept well and they both went to bed early on Sunday.
In the end, no one was hurt, but it was another nail in the coffin. The alarms went off last night at 2:00AM again, and persisted for about 45 minutes. The Wolf slept through it all, but we could tell, this morning, that he hadn't gotten much rest.
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