Plumbing part I

Cleaning jobs I can do, but a plumber I am not. So while I was able to (slightly grudgingly I'll admit) handle the vacuuming, dusting, moping, debris-removal, and various other stages in the sanitation process, some of the apartment's initial problems were out of my depth. Like, for example, the kitchen sink. When you turned the sink on, water literally poured through a hole in the underside of the fixture straight into the cabinet underneath. After sponging out several inches of standing water from the cabinet and off the kitchen floor, a plastic trash can became a temporary drainage system. It wasn't a perfect set up by far, however, and because the falling water bounced off various pipes and the bottom of the sink basin, it was impossible to catch every drop of misplaced water.

The tub was half-heartedly cleaned of plaster shavings by one of the work men a day or so after we moved in, but as it turned out, the tub faucet leaked too and they needed to repair this before a new layer of finish could be placed on the tub. Both parts for sink and tub should be easy to procure, the apartment manager assured us; they would just have to send one of the maintenance guys around to a local supplier and then could get finished... or rather, started.

Of the two problems, the sink was definitely more pressing (after all, the tub leaked into the tub), so thankfully that was the issue they decided to fix in a semi-timely manner. A couple days later we had a working kitchen sink! (Amazing how much you appreciate the little things.) There are permanent stains in the cupboard under the kitchen counter from the dingy water, but months later no more leaks! (...in the kitchen)

Back to the tub. That one little, easy-to-find piece of plumbing took them weeks to come up with. (They switched their story about a week after the initial prognosis and started to tell us that due to the age of the building--and the ancient plumbing--the part they needed was going to take a special order.) Finally, more than a month after we moved in, the faucet stopped leaking and the workmen were back to do an (extremely shoddy) sealing job on the tub. The sealer went on roughly and started peeling almost right away. Six months later there are some very large cracks in the bottom, and a section or two have entirely pulled away from the tub's surface.