Invasion

Our condo has problems. Last year, when we still liked our upstairs neighbors, :) I noticed there was water dripping down into our water heater closet. Not good. I ran upstairs and told Miriam, who got the property management company to send over a plumber. This guy was obviously not very smart--he insisted that the leak was not coming from the second floor, since there was no damage in their closet, but from the third, and then tried to distract us by cooing at Miriam's baby. Since I am not a plumber, and my landlords (my parents) live far away, nothing happened on it after that. However, the leak continued to get worse, and finally my dad decided something needed to be done. He called the property management company again, who sent the dippy plumber again, who gave the same report. Dad was not fooled--he grew up as a plumber, helping his dad--a plumber. He called in another company to take a look, who reported that not only was it coming from the second floor, but there was also mold growing in our closet. Joy. He estimated that it would take a week and lots and lots of money to fix it all.

The managers of the condo above us balked at his estimate, and wanted a second opinion. They invited a carpet cleaning company to come look. He estimated several hours and much less money; however, it sounded to me like he was a bozo and was planning on doing a lick-it-and-hope-it-sticks job. I am SOOOO not excited about this. I have a new baby, whose schedule is still not fixed, and they want to come over and spend lots of time doing construction in my small apartment, making noise, creating dust, and probably screwing stuff up. If they do a lousy job, Dad will just make them pay for someone else to do it right, which will mean more people tramping through my apartment, more dust and noise and irritation. I wish I would have gotten this taken care of earlier, but it was really out of my hands. I'm also irritated because of my lack of knowledge. I had the same problem when our car was broken--I have this vague idea that I'm being ridiculously overcharged and cheated, but since I know nothing about cars (and not very much about plumbing), I can't really do anything about it. I guess this is one of those cases where you're just supposed to trust the experts.

However, although I don't know much about plumbing, my dad does and my uncle does, and they both think this carpet guy is up in the night. My husband did construction for a year, and he agrees that there's no way he can replace the things he says he will for the price he quoted. So none of this bodes well. Can I go home now?