sovay | Comrades, you must have been smoking a lot

So this is what we discovered about our apartment on Friday. (

derspatchel pointed out it was the Ides of March. Did I look like Caesar? I don't think so.) We had had some problems with the landlord and the condition of the apartment even when we were moving in, but nothing of this magnitude. It is awful. We are waiting on the city inspector next week and then we will make decisions, but does anyone have relevant suggestions in the meantime? I want to fight for this home if it is worth fighting for, but I am not prepared to owe my soul to National Grid in order to make up for our landlord being either a chiseler, a cheapskate, or a fool. (And if he is none of these things, then I don't know why we don't have a single window in a newly renovated apartment that latches securely and also keeps out the cold. The temperature is dropping to 21°F tonight.)

In the meantime, because I will not consider this apartment a transitory thing—because as long as I am here, whether that's six weeks or six months, it is home—I picked up my futon mattress from Dream On this afternoon with the aid of

audioboy's van and then lugged it up the stairs and into my room with the aid of Rob's lower back. Wrestling the mattress cover onto it cost me the skin of three knuckles and a lot of splinters from the plywood I am using as part of my bedframe (never again), but it is now a real bed, not an air mattress, and I will sleep on it and under five blankets tonight. I had lunch with Rob at SoundBites in Ball Square before we walked our separate ways home, which is a thing I like very much about living on this street; we rejoined in the evening for Ninotchka at the Brattle Theatre. I'd last seen the movie in high school: it was even better this time. Garbo is not just beautiful, she's a beautiful comedienne, voice, timing, deadpan, eyebrows. This time, I could notice that while the romance requires her to warm from her humorless Soviet functionality, it does not require her to wilt into Melvyn Douglas' arms like a fainting flower of Western womanhood—the second-act blackmail, in fact, depends on just that strength of commitment to her work rather than her romantic vulnerability. The script's politics also interest me: Wilder and Lubitsch evidently view the Soviet way of life as both alien and faintly ridiculous, but their sympathies are equally clearly not with the émigré Grand Duchess Swana, whose bright-smiling elegance never turns a hair as she tells the peasant-born Ninotchka, "You're quite right about the Cossacks. We made a great mistake when we let them use their whips. They had such reliable guns." (I like, though, that this is not the sort of movie in which women are never friends; Ninotchka's interactions with her cellist roommate back in the Soviet Union tell the viewer that. Most of their conversation even passes the Bechdel test, being concerned, before it turns to Anna's fiancé, with rehearsals, weird housemates, and underwear.) I love Felix Bressart; I love Sig Ruman. I don't know Alexander Granach so well, but HOLY CRAP HE WAS KNOCK IN NOSFERATU THE MAN IS A CHAMELEON I AM KEEPING AN EYE OUT FOR HIM. But most of all I love Greta Garbo, laughing in the café, letting go forlornly of a censored letter, taking Douglas' face between her hands to kiss him. "Chemically, we're already quite sympathetic."

This is where my brain runs out for the night. Doppel-Abbie is resting on my pillows. I am going to take a shower. We'll figure more things out tomorrow.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I haven't been following this. These are new windows that were replacements? Newly installed?

These are new windows that were replacements? Newly installed?

I haven't been talking about it much. A small number of people, mostly

rushthatspeaks,

derspatchel, and

russetblack, have been hearing about it over e-mail. The apartment is the second floor of a Victorian, entirely renovated starting in January or February, finishing on the third of March when the last appliance was installed. (We were handed keys on the twenty-eighth of February. We could not in fact move in the next day, when our lease started, because the plumbing was not yet fully working and the kitchen was missing a refrigerator. The internet took a further two or three days to sort out because first there were no cable jacks in the apartment and then there were no working cable jacks in the apartment. There is still some issue with the roof over the sunroom that needs to be resolved, although ironically now the sunroom is the warmest room in the apartment because its windows were not altered in the renovations.) We saw the place in the middle of the renovations, when the walls were still white and there were no doors anywhere and it was difficult, I now understand, to tell what in the apartment was on its way in and what was on its way out; what we loved about it was the light and the spaciousness and the second bedroom that we realized instantly would provide us with enough space to put our sizeable book collections on shelves, not just in storage. We were able to observe that the new hardwood floors were being laid soundly and skillfully; we assumed this would reflect the quality of the rest of the renovations. No. The windows were all supposed to be new. They are certainly not the original windows, and they may be new to the apartment, but someone definitely had them before us: cracking, warping, sun-yellowing are all in evidence. It was notable to me on the first night I slept here that my room was colder than the rest of the apartment, but I thought that was because it was a small room at the very back of the house, originally intended as some kind of office or storeroom; Adrian noticed two nights ago that her room also cooled sharply at night, but thought it was because of a draft from some window she couldn't close properly. What we discovered on Friday is that the windows are just not up to code. See the rest of Adrian's post. Meanwhile, I am typing at the lovely tiny spinet desk in my room with five blankets on my new bed, and it is bitter freezing in here.

Installing secondhand windows is classic cheap landlord thinking!

New windows are heinously expensive, I know from personal experience, and I do not see why anyone would pull functional original sashes out; they're actually pretty good and easy to maintain, apart from being single-paned with poor insulating performance. I could, however, imagine that being done after a disastrous damage situation (removing the windows and laying a new floor hints at fire or a very, very serious dry rot problem). Sounds like your landlord hired a crap contractor to install crap salvaged windows.

Do you have storm windows? Screens?

Two months is a rush job for renovation. The landlord was hotter to get it rented than to finish. Was the entire building remodeled? Are other tenants having problems? Talk to them.

For the cracks, I suggest stuffing rolled fabric such as towels in there but remove any accommodations you make before the place is inspected. If you don't have storms, wrap the fabric in heavy plastic first. Cutting up heavy trash bags for this is fine. Duct tape it to stop the plastic coming loose. Make it large enough to wedge in place securely without tape. That will stop your draft problem.

No, this is not code.

When I made the complaint Friday, the city told me they would send an inspector "in 1 to 5 business days." Do you know if there is any way to get Somerville to set a more specific appointment time? We would rather not sit by the door every minute of next week (though of course we will if we have to--this is our priority.)

Call and tell them you work and that you will happily meet them if they can tell you on the morning of the day of the inspection; offer mobile numbers, etc., or just "good anytime, please just call" numbers. They would I believe normally do this with the landlord admitting them. I think. You need to talk to a local. I am not local...

ETA: I bumped the post button before continuing, City office people can be really helpful and nice when prompted.

Edited 2013-03-17 18:13 (UTC)

I could, however, imagine that being done after a disastrous damage situation (removing the windows and laying a new floor hints at fire or a very, very serious dry rot problem).

We were told the previous tenants were students who had trashed the place so badly that at the point where the landlord found himself replacing all the floors and replastering all the walls, he gave up and started over from scratch. It is possible to conjecture as to the original layout of the apartment, but very little of even the floor plan remains. And the light is wonderful, and the weather when we were looking was warm, and Adrian has a master bedroom with a walk-in closet more than half the size of my room and it has six windows and none of them are insulated enough to keep the apartment at a temperature where she can sleep in her room at night.

Screens?

Not in all the windows.

I suggest stuffing rolled fabric such as towels in there but remove any accommodations you make before the place is inspected.

Oh, yes. We have discussed this. We want the inspector to see the problem.

and I do not see why anyone would pull functional original sashes out

I definitely agree with you; but my experience is that that does not stop people from pulling them out.

I definitely agree with you; but my experience is that that does not stop people from pulling them out.

I wish we could have seen the original condition of the apartment, even if it was as bad as the landlord has been telling us. The walls were changed and the floors half pulled up by the time we saw it.

They did a gut remodel on this?

My spider sense is tingling. Start gossiping around the building and the neighborhood. Find out what it was like.

(And how long has he owned it? The "students trashed it" story could be true and in that case your neighbors may well know about them. If it is not true, you need to know how it got trashed.)

ogod, yeah: double-check re: bedbugs.

You should be able to find out whether permits were pulled for the work. It would be good to know that. In our city, window replacement does not require an inspection but does require a permit.

You should be able to find out whether permits were pulled for the work. It would be good to know that.

That is on our list already. We are somewhat skeptical the landlord or the contractors even filed for a permit—

derspatchel and

ratatosk had months of work done on the house they live in last summer before it was discovered the landlord had never obtained a permit and a stop-work order was slapped on their front door. It's still there.

>See the rest of Adrian's post

That would be my post to the Davis Square LJ.
http://davis-square.livejournal.com/3130381.html#comments
I haven't posted about it on my personal LJ.

Comrades, you must have been smoking a lot

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject