Feces From the Heavens...

I spent a large chunk of yesterday afternoon cleaning my upstairs neighbor's feces from the many surfaces in my bathroom.

About nine months ago I came home to find a strange rusty looking stain running down my bathroom wall and into my medicine cabinet. The pipes in my building are old and rusty and I thought that it might just be a bit of a leak. I threw away everything in the cabinet, complained to my landlord, and after he'd come and looked embarrassed and assured me it wasn't waste water I ignored it.

A couple of months ago, after the upstairs neighbors left their kitchen sink on, overflowing and flooding down through my kitchen cabinets (they've done this twice more, once damaging my living room ceiling) I started looking up, and realized that there was a leak in my bathroom ceiling that was becoming occasionally bedewed. Eventually it began to drip occasionally and I complained to my landlord. He didn't do anything, but then I caught him one day showing the apartment across the way to some prospective renters, and I took him in to show him the problem. By this time it had begun to drip when the neighbors flushed their toilet. I thought it was a leaky feed pipe because the water seemed to be clear, but I didn't want to deal with it anyway. He said he'd come in and fix it.

The next day he came and ripped out my ceiling to the lathe, but didn't do anything else, and didn't leave me a note explaining what was going on. So, rather than having a drip of clear water when the neighbors flushed I had a small stream of sediment filled dirty water. Unpleasantly, once or twice over the next week I was using the bathroom when the neighbors upstairs flushed, and the water came down on me. I hate confrontation. I'm terribly passive aggressive, but this was it for me. I sent a letter along with my rent check saying that if he didn't fix all the stuff wrong with the apartment I was going to start looking for another place.

The next day he showed up with the plumber (which he'd been promising for three months to fix the bathtub). I came home from work at 5:30 to find them still working. There was a big hole over my toilet and bits of crap (literally), mortar, and drying toilet paper all over everything. They said that the waste water pipe had just rotted away, and was emptying into the ceiling when the neighbors flushed.

When they knocked off at 6:30 they had finished the pipe, but not the bathtub. I asked them about it and they said that they were going to have to come back in and tear out all the tile to fix it. They made a cursory vacuuming with a shop vac in the bathroom before they left, which got the big pieces of mortar, but left everything else.

So yesterday I stripped (I didn't want to get any on my clothes even though I know that it'd wash out) and cleaned with a big bucket of bleach and a scrub brush. There's still a big hole in the ceiling and the cold water knob on the bathtub is still a rusted broken mess, but at least there's no more feces.

Someone even came in and tried to fix the ceiling in the living room. Of course they did it by tearing chunks of the paper off and patching it (incompletely, so there are bare spots) with joint compound. It means I have big three-toned splotches that look worse than the sagging cracked paper did before, but I guess he should get partial credit for trying.

I'm still thinking about moving. I don't want to because I just moved into a new ward, and I'm settling in, and it's just a pain to pack up and deal with all the crap you accumulate. But I might just have to suck it up and do it. It might be less trouble than staying.