10- Waterfall in the apartment, and an indifferent troika

(It may be a good idea to read the posts in reverse order, hence starting wit the oldest one)

Coming to the apartment on that rainy evening made me shiver of a mixture of horror and pleasure.

The rain was forming waterfalls in various places, the now tile free floor was soaking wet and I could just imagine the scenes in the apartments below mine. Sagging ceilings, buckets on the floor and wet socks on the inhabitants.

Now the community of neighbors just would have to listen and immediately do the repairs required by Madrid City. But first thing first. I needed to get this documented, and preferably while the rain was still pouring down, like the flood from the old testament. The community could wait, and if my downstairs neighbors were anything like me, they would already be calling the reigning troika to get them to do something (I was wrong about this assumption; no one does anything in this community unless the sect leader has told them to).

I rushed home and called some friends I know in order to get a notary to come over already the next day (the weather forecast promised rain for two days more, but I didn't want to stretch my luck). Thank heavens I have some friends with good contacts! Both the notary and an architect would arrive already the next day.

So, why do I need both of them to come? Here is why;

The Notary is the person who will make the official report to be used in court rooms and in other legal situations. The architect is the expert on buildings and will make a technical document about what to do about the problem.

I was not as lucky with the weather gods as I had hoped the day after, but still it was a slight drizzle of rain, and you could clearly see where the water had come though and everything was sill very damp.

I had already arranged to meet the reigning troika from the community of neighbors, so that they too would see the disaster. They also brought along the architect that the community has hired for the enforced renovations. Good for me.

They were all to arrive about an hour after the notary and the architect had left.

I decide to wait for them all on the street, and imagine my surprise when I see two old  men, the Administrator (a bit over 70) and Señor Alamo (in his 60:es I would think, the head of the works committee, sect leader and self acclaimed owner of the community) walking towards me, arm in arm, giggling and whispering lite thirteen year old girls. Don't tell me that is professional relationship between a community representative and the appointed Administrator!

Into my apartment they come, googling like vultures scanning the landscape for a fresh carcass, and start to explain that yes. something needs to be done.

Praise to the lord! I think, but I should have held my breath.

- ...but this is such a simple thing to fix. we just need to repair a few of the tiles where the leakages are, and we are done.

Hang on... if you have ever done any kind of renovations of old roofs you know that there is more to it that that.

1. Old tiles become brittle and they also shift easily when walking on the roof. Hence you need to change whole portions of the roof to do this right. Not just a tile or two.
2. A leakage can actually origin from another point in the roof than were the water finally comes into the spaces below. This also means a bigger investigation and repair project.
3. Due to decades of water pouring down on the beams some of them clearly needed to be investigated and maybe replaced
4. We already know that the roof laths were broken in many places and should also be repaired

Finally the morons ask me to put a bucket in the worst place and empty it on a regular basis.

The nerve! 

There was no sink in the apartment, and I had no intention of going back and forth to the apartment to empty a bucket that would not have been filled at all, should the community of neighbors have done their obligations in the first place!

You can see the filled bucket to the left. This was after just a few hours of rain. You also see the spot of water around it where the waterfall missed the bucket or the water simply "bounced" out of it. I guess the neighbor below eventually got somewhat wet...

While having the architect appointed by the community in my apartment I also bring up another urgent issue. The one about heating and cooling the apartment.

This is a top floor apartment and gets very hot in the summer. I therefore asked where i could put the external part of the air-conditioning, but Señor Alamo, the high priest of the sect, cuts in:

- You cant. It is forbidden by the community to have air-conditioning machines in the patios.

I could not believe my ears. Coming from Sweden, where winters are cold,but we still try to save on heating costs, Air-to-Air heat exchangers are used for heating during the cold months and that was what I had planned for this apartment as well. So not only would I not be able to live in the apartment during the 40 degrees Celsius hot summers, I would also have to install a separate, non-eco friendly and expensive heating system I did not want in the first place!

Not only that... the ones privileged enough to have windows to the streets all have air conditioning and the machines are all put on their balconies. That my dear friends is actually forbidden. By lay. By Madrid City!
And to make things worse. I am the only one with an interior apartment with the baking sun hitting my roof all day long. You can see that in the picture to the right.

Now... This all meant war, and as always; better be well informed before you attack. This, however, meant yet another request to the Administrator. I was not looking forward to it.

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