Professionals to the Rescue

The building manager tried to get a plumber to come that very night. That was impossible, but one came first thing the next morning and fixed whatever was wrong. Tom, going by the second-hand instructions he received, had removed the wrong cap, and it also turned out that the valve that had recently been installed was defective. (I will mention that I got five hours of sleep on that drippy, nasty, foul-smelling night. I was up until 1:30 a.m. trying to soak up as much water as possible.)

Next to arrive was a cheery young electrician, who removed my three affected light fixtures and temporarily installed bare bulbs dangling from wires.

Close on his heels were the water damage people, three men. I had aimed a fan at the wettest part of my carpet and let it run overnight, but that was laughably inadequate. They came in and used instruments to determine where the water was. By this time, it had made its way into my living room and yellow streaks had appeared on the ceiling and walls nearest the bathroom, and an expanse of plaster was getting ready to fall. I asked if I needed to move my bookshelves and they said: yep. This is a very tiny place, so finding a place to put every single book, CD and every other thing that was on those shelves was a challenge.

Hammett sat calmly in his spot in the walk-in closet through most of this. Then the drying guys got out knives and starting taking up the carpet to see where it was wet underneath, and then they installed industrial-strength fans and dehumidifiers in my place, Tom’s, the building manager’s, and the hallways outside my place and Tom’s. In my place there were six fans altogether and three dehumidifiers. The head drying guy, who was very pleasant and friendly, said the windows had to be closed while these things were running, so as not to introduce humidity when we were trying to get rid of humidity. The dehumidifiers—one each in the living room, bathroom, and kitchen—put out more than a hundred degrees of heat.

In sum, it was extremely hot (95 degrees, where it is usually 71), extremely loud, and rather arid in my place, for an entire week. It was also dark, because I quickly realized that opening the shades meant light came in and made it even hotter. The drying guy said I could turn the stuff in the living room off while I slept, but I wanted this phase to be over as soon as possible, so I left everything running all night, and wore earplugs. Hammett evidently hadn’t gotten the news that cats’ hearing is more sensitive than ours. He was perfectly serene at almost every moment and seemed to positively enjoy being a temporary fan owner. (I learned later that cats can seal up their ears to keep out damaging sound, though not instantly; if you fire a gun near a cat, you might damage its hearing.) I think he liked the heat and the vibrations. He was even seen tenderly licking a fan one day.

The daughter of the building’s owner came and spent the day with us—her insurance person came—and she was incredibly nice about the whole thing. She was calm and cheerful, and said, “Stuff happens.”

Everyone who came in took tons of pictures. The bathroom light fixture was a particular crowd pleaser.

(Click photos to enlarge.)