Tuesday, July 01, 2008


So.
I spent the better half of yesterday "fixing" our deck.
For the past month, dog feces, dog urine, cigarette butts, ashes, and a mysterious white slime have been dripping on our deck from the people upstairs. After I asked, they scraped the actual piles of crap off their deck, but enough fecal matter and urine were still crusted in the cracks for swarms of flies to want to make OUR deck their home. We've not been able to go out on our deck for the past month because of this, and I've talked to the management 3 times about it. The first time they sent someone out to power wash it, the second time they said they were going to power wash the upstairs neighbor's deck as well but didn't, and we were still left with a stank-nasty unuseable deck. Brandy convinced me to buy a kiddie pool to put out there after she said she cleaned it off and it hadn't rained for a couple days. The kids played in it, came in smelling like dog piss, and in the morning there were ashes floating in the pool. So for the third time I went to the management and asked them to provide a permanent solution, or let me put up some sort of barrier and reimburse me. They said OK to option #2, so I went to Lowe's and went to town. A very kind brother in the lord let me borrow his truck for the day while I worked on the project, and when the day was done, we had a very decent looking second roof made of corrugated polycarbonate sheeting. All for the low low price of 250.00. I wrapped the receipt up in a letter detailing what I expected them to reimburse me and options for reimbursement. Brandy delivered it this morning (she said the woman at the desk didn't look very happy at the figure, apparently she thought I was just going to drape a tarp over our deck to loosely funnel the excess piss towards the edge of the deck. I have a missed call from her on my cell, but aside from the cordless drill that I bought to finish the project, I'm committed to making them pay for it all. They agreed to it beforehand, they haven't done anything effective despite my repeated requests, since they haven't done anything, my kids have been exposed to animal waste, and the deck smells like it, so does the area of the carpet directly in front of the deck door, and really, I could have charged them for labor! It took me half a day to finish! That's not my favorite way of spending my day off.
So, if you could spend five minutes and pray that they would see reason and reimburse me for the whole thing without any trouble, that would be great.

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