An inevitable whinge

I’m afraid you’ve not escaped the saga of the leaky ceiling. Following the leak debacle a couple of weeks ago, when water started leaking from the currently unoccupied flat above mine, resulting in various frantic phone calls to my building maintenance company, the company that I think I am insured with (paperwork and record keeping is not my strong point), the police (yes, really), and a friend of a friend who owned a crowbar and seemed fairly keen to come round and use it, I now have a stain on my bathroom ceiling. It’s not a big stain, or a very obvious stain, but I know it’s there - and the point is, it wasn’t there two weeks ago before the slightly dodgy builder/decorator working on the flat upstairs “didn’t tighten the nut enough”.

After lots of phone calls and an emergency visit from my Dad to hold the fort while I had to go to work, in scenes reminiscent of the oven fiasco a few years ago when I first left home (I love having retired parents, and as he rightly said, “That’s what Dads are for”), it was agreed that the offending builder himself would come and repaint the ceiling once it had dried out. This was arranged for 9 o’clock this morning - I have a day‘s holiday, which I wouldn‘t have chosen to spend waiting in for someone to paint my ceiling, but needs must and all that. Being like I am about timekeeping (i.e. absolutely militant), I was starting to feel irritated by about three minutes past nine when he hadn’t showed up, so you can imagine my annoyance when it got to 9.40, and I was on the phone to the maintenance company again, telling them in no uncertain terms that they needed to pass it over to the owners of the flat to deal with. I then felt slightly stupid having to call them back five minutes later when he arrived.

He’s now been in and put a layer of gloss over the stain, and is coming back at 3 p.m. to finish the job. The glossing took him about 30 seconds, so I am wondering what on earth he’s doing upstairs as he seems to have been working there for about a month, and it’s only a two bedroom flat. The only sign of anything happening is a few bags of rubble and a sink pedestal which are currently making the place look untidy outside the front door of the block. As you can probably imagine, that’s irritating me too. I’ve got visions of Flat 5 being like the Palace of Versailles inside when he’s finished - although admittedly he doesn’t look capable of creating anything along those lines. All he’s done in my bathroom, aside from the glossing, is leave a very strong smell of stale cigarettes. I’ve been marching round the flat with a can of Glade, but I think I may have to go and buy a plug in.