I have a gas problem…

Last week it was time to fire up and test the second floor water heater. The only thing holding us back was the locked gas meter for the second floor unit – or so we thought... After giving Peoples Gas a call on their emergency phone line, they quickly arrived to the scene within 4 hours. The lock was popped off, a couple swift kicks to loosen the valve, and gas had been turned back on to the unit upstairs. The gas man marked the meter using a sharpie and stalked the dial like a hawk for movement. Ten minutes later and sure enough it had slightly moved. What did this mean? A gas leak….

When I first opened up and exposed the kitchen walls around two months ago I thought it was fascinating that my building still had the original 100 year old gas lamp lines. The lines were installed at the turn of the century before electricity had been wired to the house. The first pipes I noticed were the risers in the kitchen, upon opening the roof we found the piping ran to all the ceiling fixtures in the entire house and had been covered with new light electric fixtures.

After the gas man noted the leak he pulled out a fancy meter and started checking all the recent work the plumbers had done. No beeps. Our attention, as you may have guessed from my segway, quickly shifted to the 100 year old gas lines. Could it really still have gas running through the lines after 100 years of not being used? BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. Yeap.

What is scary about this is the fact that the leak was coming from an old ceiling fixture line that should have been sealed and capped off. Every time the light was turned off and on it was like playing a game of Russian roulette on whether my attic would be going up in flames.

While a huge fire may have solved my water damage problem, the gas man didn’t allow that option and quickly shut off (locked) the meter. The plumbers came out on Friday and traced the old lines to the basement, cut the pipes, and capped them off. After 100 years the house no longer has gas running through my ceilings and walls and is finally an all “electric” property. Thomas Edison would be proud.

Rain Rain Go Away

When I arrived into my home with moving boxes on Monday morning I experienced one of the most helpless moments of my life. I entered the front door and immediately had flash backs from my childhood of a waterpark called Wyandot Lake. This time however there was no laughing or sounds of kids enjoying their adolescent worry free life’s, just the echoes of free falling water as it saturated the 100 year old wood floors.

As I sit on a plane right now returning from a business trip in San Diego I can’t get the house out of my head. With recent storms that blew in again yesterday, saying I’m anxious to get home would be a colossal understatement. It has been a tough and emotional week as the roofers botched the tearoff and replacement of the flat roof when they didn’t cover it before the storm on Monday. It’s ironic that I write this post after my previous one on Angie’s list as this contractor was not an Angie’s list contractor. Since I can’t write a nasty complaint on Angie’s website, I’ll use my blog as both a sounding board about this company and a therapeutic release of frustration. To the owner of the construction companies credit he has accepted fault and created a plan to remedy all damages under his insurance policy. Nonetheless I’m now moved into the first floor unit while living under a huge tarp and and my time schedule for getting my second floor unit rentable is set back by at least 2 weeks. With a projected rent of around $1,400/mon for the unit this setback will cost me personally around $700.

A water restoration company entered the scene on Tuesday and have been working hard to remove moisture from the building. Over seven fans have been setup creating a hurricane effect on my second floor while turning my electric meter into a ferociously spinning top. Our hope is the original wood floors will not need replaced. The total cost for the roof replacement was budgeted around $11,000, an additional $2,000 was spent to replace the insulation, and $3,500 to replace all the decking with new plywood. In addition a mold company is to be paid around $4,000 for treatment and preventive spray in the attic while the roof was open. Needless to say this will all be ripped up and redone. The only portion of the project that will remain was the $6,000 of masonry work that was done to rebuild my north parapet wall and spot tuck the inner parapet walls for the new roof.

It has been an early lesson that investment properties are not a cake walk or for the light hearted. Tears will be shed, but the long term potential will hopefully outweigh the short term set backs. I look forward to getting back into town and regaining some sort of stability in my home life.

Original plaster ceiling will need torn down and redone