The Second Floor

Most of the time I spend in my apartment, I spend on the second floor, which consists of a bedroom and a full bathroom.

My hotel room.

The bedroom is the one room in the apartment without any problems.  Actually, just kidding.  Every room has problems.  By far the biggest threat to the bedroom was mold.  For the longest time the air conditioner couldn't go below 77 degrees Fahrenheit and there were leaks in the plumbing.  Warm air + moisture = happy mold.  The stuff was everywhere and I lost a backpack and some juggling beanbags to it.  Mold was all over campus.  Still is.  I don't think there's a single person living on campus that hasn't been affected by it.  There's a lot more to the mold story, but it's far too long to be addressed here.

Another bedroom plague has been noise pollution.  You already know about the fire alarms.  Well there's also construction.  Everyday it continues, and everyday it brings a new din of whirring, cutting, or pounding.  You can hear it echoing through the neighborhood, unless the work is being done right outside your window, in which case it echoes through your bone marrow.  Oh, and work starts very early in the morning.

Serenade with generators and jackhammers.

Compliments that I can give to the bedroom: decent bed, plenty of storage space, air conditioner now works, receives lots of natural light.

As for the bathroom, it embodies everything that is wrong with Kaust housing.  It looks fine, but just beneath the paper thin exterior is a depressing anthology of issues.  It was the spawning point for the mold colony that became a living breathing wallpaper for much of my apartment.  It was the cause of the monsoons on the first and second floors.  It is a study in how to build a 'new' home with approximately no attention to detail.  At one point the entire waterlogged ceiling collapsed.  I was sleeping in the bedroom and I heard a series of crashes.  The drywall fell.  Then the lights fell, exploded, and shorted out.

In the end, it was this bathroom that prompted the complete overhaul of my apartment.  I had to move to temporary housing for a month while I supervised the extrication of moldy drywall, the proper sealing and insulation of pipes, and the correction of carpentry errors.

Good times.

Of course not everything has been fixed, nor will it ever be, but it is in better shape than it was.  For instance, Kaust was gracious enough to give me another ceiling.  They also fixed the shower drainage problems.  And they installed a trap for the toilet.

Most of the remaining problems are aesthetic.  If I were going to be living here longer I would care.  But I'm not, so I don't.  There are irremovable brown stains in the tub, there are scratches and paint smudges on the mirror, not every joint fits neatly, not every gap is closed, the toilet seat can't stay up, the cabinet doors beneath the sink fall off of their rusty hinges.  Water pools in the sink and the wall tiling is still comically bad.

Case in point(s).

But you know what?  One way or another, I'm leaving this place in a week.