The ass of luxury

So after an exciting adventure on the good side of the groinal area of luxury, we swing around to the other side, the seedy neighborhood that nobody frequents, where people roll up their windows and floor it - the ass of luxury.

I call it the ass of luxury because really, when you think about it, complaining about a house that you're living in for free is really a flyspeck compared to the other problems in the world. But dammit, 96% of blogs out there exist just so people can vent their petty frustrations to the world with a heaping dollop of half-witty sarcasm (for the record, the other 4% are a mix of horrendously bad poetry, would-be spammers, and people who speak Portuguese. Seriously, go to a blogspot blog sometime and hit "next" in the top navbar. You'll hit a blog in Portuguese within ten clicks, I guarantee it. I just tested it, and hit one in two).

The place Mrs. Dave and I have lived in for the past four years is hopelessly out of date from a fire code standpoint, but since it's a) on the outskirts of campus and b) only houses seven people, it was low on their list of buildings to fix up. It got bumped up this year because an inordinate proportion of incoming students made it impossible for them to be housed elsewhere, so they decided that in the process of converting one of the two apartments into more rooms, they'd do the fire code update thang as well. This, of course, involves relocating us while they knock every non-load-bearing wall out of the place, rip up and de-asbestos the floors, and finally get rid of the it-crawled-out-of-the-50's kitchen. Praise the Lord and pass the sledgehammer for that, I'll bash the crap out of it if it saves them some labor costs.

The locus of our relocation is apparently the only structure on campus lower on the renovation totem pole than our old building. I think there are dumpsters and phone booths with more creature comforts. There's no deadbolt on the front door; no doorbell either. There's dingy, pale-blue paint in what was supposed to be our bedroom, dull dark-green paint in what turned into our bedroom, several closets that are only deep enough for hanging up ties and belts, and a sponge-paint job in the kitchen. Toss in a basement straight out of The Silence of the Lambs, the lack of mowing for several months, and the fact that an enormous storm had felled a ton of leaves and branches on the driveway parking area postage stamp where our car is supposed to go - which had not been cleaned up - and you've got yourself a shitty little cottage.

Now, imagine that this cottage had been built for emaciated midgets, and you'll get an idea of what moving in was like. They took the front door off its hinges. They took both dining room doors off their hinges. They were unable to fit our boxspring upstairs, so that threw a huge wrench into our house layout plans - what was originally going to be our bedroom upstairs turned into the office/computer room, and vice versa (just as well, since it's fargin' hot up there). To get the computer desk into the upstairs office, they tried to take THAT door off but it banged into the molding above it (it's a peg-and-hole hinge, not the meshing bolt-and-cylinder hinge on most modern doors). Turns out that when they built the house, they installed doors and molding such that the door had to be opened 180 degrees to lift it off its hinges. Then they had the bright idea to built a closet inside the room which would PREVENT this door from being able to open thusly...and hence from being able to be lifted off its hinges. Fortunately, one of the movers had experienced this kind of dilemma before, and produced a screwdriver, whereupon he physically removed the hinge from the door, tipped it away from the molding, and then lifted it off the bottom hinge. We slid the desk in, he returned the door to its rightful place, and we may just leave the damn thing there when we move out in three months.

The other door-removing adventure consisted of getting our washer and dryer down into the basement. In order to get to the basement in this place, you have to go through the front foyer, through the dining room, and into our bedroom before you get to the basement staircase. They got the dryer in through the front door just fine. The dining room door had to be removed to get the dryer in there. But the doorway to our bedroom was just too damn small. We had gone this route because I had gone down into the basement ("...it places the lotion in the basket...") and seen a half-size door, barely big enough for one of the movers to get through, let alone oversized parcels. Since I knew this house had been inhabited previously by normal, laundry-doing folk, there HAD to be some way of getting down there, and I figured the staircase was the way to go. But because of a burned-out light bulb, I had failed to see the full-size door coming in the other side. ..after we had gone all the way through this adventure. Mystery solved, dryer backed out, everything else moved in without incident.

Tuesday was spent mostly unpacking the vitals and lamenting the fact that the weather was back up to above 90. And then we had torrential rains on Wednesday. Normally this isn't a problem, but they had also resurfaced the road in front of our house, which raised it just enough to be level with the gap in the curb corresponding with the concrete stairway down to our front walk. Yes, down, because the house is built on a slope. The water came gushing down our front walk, ran into our front steps, and then flowed along the foundation, trying to get the rest of the way down the hill. Instead, it flowed directly THROUGH our
foundation, and gushed into our basement, thoroughly soaking the back of our washer and dryer. This wasn't seeping down the walls, this was spraying through the cracks, water landing a good foot or so away from the wall, including some that flowed between the stones that make up the foundation, bringing a good deal of sediment and mortar with them, and a rather large gusher that was pouring down the back of our washer and dryer, and the back of a plank that served as a backboard for much of the electrical wiring for our washer and dryer; the water was actually entering the back of our dryer through where the wiring entered it at the top. I pulled the dryer away from the wall, unhooking the vent and unplugging the sucker, and only then did I realize I was standing in my bare feet, playing with electronics. Kids, don't try this at home.

I frantically called night maintenance, who showed up in knee-length galoshes, and they basically said that as long as our pump was working, it was ok, and that someone would be in the next day to hook everything back up. After that was done, we tried to do a load of laundry, only to find that enough sediment had gotten into the back of our dryer to get all over the drum belt, which resulted in there not being enough grab from the rubber to actually make the belt turn...so the motor wheel burned through the belt and snapped it. I'm hoping that's the only damage but the good thing about not owning your own place is that if stuff like that causes damage, we're covered. Again, it's ass, but it's the ass of luxury.