Maintenance Wars and Wildlife

Today is beautiful! It was about 70 and sunny when I took Grover for a long walk down to the water. On our way, we saw our first rabbit at Cherry Creek and also a yellow bird that I think is an American Goldfinch...:

 Again, these images were lovingly and illegally taken from Google Images.

Ok so for those of you who are following the saga of our need for maintenance in this apartment, I thought I'd give a run down of things past and present.

April:
a. Refrigerator: Leaking massive amounts of water from the area between the freezer and the fridge.

May:
a. Sewer back up: Flooding in the apartment coming up through the floor due to sewer back up for entire building. Only our apartment was affected by the flood. Also, seal under the toilet is replaced.
b. Carpet wet from flood: Carpet cleaners came twice to suck up the water and spray anti-cootie stuff all over the affected areas. Total water volume exceeded 5 gallons that they removed from the apartment floor.
c. Linoleum in bathroom wet underneath: Maintenance wouldn't listen to me, so this didn't get addressed.

June:
a. Toilet leaking: Toilet with the seal that was replaced now leaking. Maintenance shuts toilet off and we are unable to use the toilet for a week while we wait to have it replaced.

July:
a. Toilet replaced: Got a new toilet, however new toilet is a different shape than old toilet so the floor is now exposed. Need to get linoleum replaced.
b. Linoleum replaced: Guy who replaced linoleum made a point to tell me how wet it was under the linoleum. See May Bullet c. All it took was an entire toilet to need replacing in order for them to do something about the water under the linoleum. However, that bathroom looks 100% better with the new floor so hooray.
c. Dishwasher makes dishes dirty: Our latest problem has actually been a problem the entire time we've lived here but until now it was in the shadow of bigger problems like floods and stuff. Dishes go in semi-clean and come out really dirty with brown gunk and black specks of who knows what on them. They also have a gross clear film. Needless to say, we don't use the dishwasher. I resolved to stop using it when I realized I handwash 80% of what comes out of it anyway, so I might as well skip the loading and unloading steps and just handwash everything to start with.

I'm still waiting for someone to actually come and look at the dishwasher. I look forward to the day that I don't have to deal with the maintenance people every other week. I think in my entire renting life (2004-2009) I didn't make nearly as many maintenance calls as I have in the past three months of living here. It's really amazing actually. And by amazing, I of course mean irritating and exhausting.

All in all, the maintenance people have been pretty good about responding to calls. Lately though, it seems evident they are tired of me and my apartment and they are starting to drop the ball a bit. Well, I'm tired of them too but we didn't choose this place because we wanted a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom, soaked floors, with a leaky fridge, without a working dishwasher kind of apartment. So they must come fix it so I have a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom, with dry floors, a dishwasher that washes and a working fridge. Unfortunately, dropping the ball means they hear from me more often than if they would just respond promptly and work efficiently. Too bad for them. :)

What will break next? More to come I'm sure...