So here’s a story. If you’ve been following my twitter feed you will have heard snippets of this, but I wanted to post SOMETHING here because it’s been a month and a half when I expected to be gone for a couple of days.

Last November/December (don’t remember the exact date) we decided/discovered that we needed to move out of our previous place. The story behind that isn’t terribly long or complex but it’s irrelevant to this particular story; suffice it to say that the reasons were more happy than upsetting and it wasn’t a huge deal.

In January we found a new place – it’s on the ground floor (really half-buried so it counts as a basement apartment) with two bedrooms and nice flooring throughout, and it’s reasonably sized. Plus it’s pretty cheap and not too far away from downtown where my office is. Great! We decide we want to go for it and after some running around and reference checks and all that we’re in. Since the previous tenant moved out early we get the keys early so we can start moving stuff over bit by bit so that there’s less to do on the Big Move Day.

A few days before the Big Move Day, we stopped by with some boxes and noticed that the carpet in the corner of the smaller of the bedrooms (which we intend to use as an office/computer room) seems a bit damp. Not a huge deal, we figure, since the carpets have just been shampooed and it’s probably just not dry yet. We let our landlord know though, just in case. He agrees that it’s probably just left over dampness from cleaning the carpet.

So we move in. The Big Move Day is Saturday. Less than a week later, Thursday morning, I wake up at about 6:00 am to my girlfriend telling me that the floor in our bedroom (this is the larger one) is wet. I wake up, swing my feet out of bed, and they splash when they hit the carpet. A quick taking stock of the situation ensues: both of the bedrooms' carpets are wet enough that water wells up around your feet when you stand in the affected areas (which comprise the majority of the floor in the two rooms). We start hauling clothes and cardboard boxes off of the floors (remember, we’ve been here less than a week at this point) and call our landlord. He gets back to us after a couple of hours and then shows up with a plumber. At this point we assume a pipe burst in the storm overnight.

But no broken pipes are found. The weather outside that night WAS nasty, so we figure maybe some freezing rain caused something to back up somewhere. The carpets all get pulled out of the bedrooms and placed in a warm dry place, and the cement floor under the carpets starts to dry out. Of course, at this point, whatever water came in has ceased flowing. Next Tuesday, things are basically all dried out, so the floor gets painted with an anti mold paint and the carpets get put back in. Since there was no apparent cause, we cross our fingers and hope it doesn’t happen again. All of the furniture gets put back in place and we get to sleep in our bedroom again, rather than in our living room.

We get about a week of use out of the small bedroom. We get our computers set up and the internet cabling run down the hall. It’s a tiny bit cramped but it’s great. Until Monday morning of our fourth week here (last Monday), we discover that the small bedroom’s carpet is again wet. Thankfully this time it is in a much smaller area so we just pull up the corner and put a heater in to start drying it out. Our landlord is again puzzled by it and says the heater’s good and he’ll look into it more.

The following Monday (this week), the small bedroom floods again. It’s worse this time. They find some cracks on the outside of the building and seal them up. Hope it doesn’t happen again.

It’s happened again today.

All in all this has been really frustrating and combined with the fact that things have been really busy at work for the last month, I’ve been sapped of energy and time.

And that is what I did on my summer vacation why I haven’t been making Gruedorf posts. I’ve got two basically saved up but I seriously just don’t have the energy to actually put them together right now. Unfortunately, I also don’t know when I will have said energy. Believe me, I’m more upset about this than any of you are.