Well, we will call the landlord again tomorrow with the news that it is very nice our sink now drains but that tearing out that part of the wall and replacing a corroded joint did not fix the flooding. Because the bathroom flooded again today and this time I was able to catch it in several stages of its flooding, rather than coming in and finding the bathroom a pool. Apparently a pipe under the concrete floor is broken. There’s a couple of feet section between the bathtub and sink where obviously the ancient tiles were once removed and relaid in an uneven pouring of concrete. The landlord remarked on this when he was here last Sunday, hoping that wasn’t the problem, phrasing it that you could see where it looked like they’d worked on the pipes down there sometime before, which means it was over thirty years ago as our landlord has been landlord of this building since the 70s.
Anyway, a problem we had last Sunday was pinpointing exactly from where the water was coming. I said that the way it was acting was like it was coming up through the floor and the landlord decided it was perhaps from inside the wall and excavated and replaced the corroded joint that was causing the sink not to drain and was indeed dumping water back there as the area was wet.
But there is another source. I walked in the bathroom today and found that the bathroom mat in front of the sink was soaked through again. There was no water anywhere around it and none between the bathtub and the sink, in that area where the floor had in the past been removed and relaid. So I removed the bathroom mat and started coming back every ten minutes to check the floor out. Eventually then the area between the sink and bathtub began to flood, and the water is obviously coming up through the concrete and tile. I would soak it up and watch it promptly repool up through the floor. And then I returned to find later a small amount of water had appeared on the tiles in front of the bathtub where the floor has never been removed. So, from where the sink begins to the back of the bathroom, a good portion of the bathroom floor has become a spring and the water is coming up through the old tile and concrete. There is no one small spot where the water is coming up through the floor. It is coming up through the tiles in different areas over a space of a number of feet. It is soaking up through the floor in front of the sink. It is pooling up in the area between the tub and sink. It is soaking up through the tile in front of the bathtub. It is also obviously pooling up from under the sink cabinet. Where the cabinet (vintage 50s) sits on the floor there are two places where the tile is chipped out and the water is pooling up in those as well and flooding out. There’s no one source with the tiles acting as little beds that the water flows into. No, the water is coming up through the floor in all these different places.
I am not looking forward to having half of the bathroom floor ripped out, the sink taken out. And that’s what I guess is going to come next. And not a linoleum over wood floor. Nothing so simple. An ancient tile in concrete floor. They will come in I guess with things like big hammers and bust up the floor. It will be a foul mess. I am wondering how long this will take. I am wondering what our bathroom floor will look like afterwards. I will be allergic to all of it because I’m allergic to dust and mildew and mold and everything.
Sigh.
At least today I was able to watch the process and see what’s going on and it was no small satisfaction to not just walk in after the flood but to be able to catch it from the beginning and watch as it began pooling up here and there through the cement and tile, swab it up and sit and watch it continue to pool up.
Early evening I had a nap and dreamt that I was checking an old pipe that leads from the old rounded porcelain tub to the wall and that it was springing leaks everywhere (nonexistent as the tub has two pipes that go down into the floor). Too bad it’s not that simple. But I felt the same satisfaction in the dream, that I’d finally caught the pipe when it was leaking instead of after.
Pretend we are PBS. Installments on the state of the bathroom are sure to follow.
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