Friday morning I wrote three posts about the first three days of our plumbing saga. They'd repainted that morning and said that there was nothing else to do. Friday, it was hopefully ending. Mr. George had called and said everything was finished, and I went over after lunch to check it out.
Except for it being a bit odd having white stripes everywhere, the kitchen terrace certainly looked much neater:
Well, until one looked closer and saw some more cat prints...
The shower was dirty, but the tiling seemed neatly done, and with a brand-new drain. No idea what the board leaning against the wall was for, though:
The connection under the bathroom sink to a new drain hole looked somewhat sloppy, and I wasn't impressed with the use of flexible hosing and silicon, and the paint was soaking wet, but naively, I was still believing that they knew what they were doing:
I went back to the flat where we were staying, and Jacob stayed to use the computer in the peace and quiet of the empty house.
A little after 3:30, it started absolutely pouring with rain, and then hail, and with a lot of wind. I got the very nearly dry laundry inside, then took a photo out the front door of our car, and the street running with water:
A few minutes later, my phone rang. Jacob was calling to tell me it was raining. Yes, I'd noticed. Then he explained that the kitchen terrace was completely under water and the paint was floating all over the place. Jörn called Mr. George, and he and a plumber showed up at the house to discuss things. I've kind of lost track of the order of things. At one point (before the rain, I think?), while Marie and Jacob were both in the house, the plumbers and/or construction workers and Mr. George had been there and had all screamed at each other, running from room to room and finally storming out of the house and to their respective cars and driving away. Then this scene was repeated when Jörn met with them after the rain. In the bathroom, Jörn pointed out that the paint on the floor was wet, and the man argued that it was dry. Finally, he scraped the paint off and said it was fine now, we could move back in, and Jörn said no, it was WET, we could NOT move into the house and have small children here. So then the guy grabbed a roll of toilet paper and sopped up a bunch of water and said NOW it was dry!!
Later that evening I took a photo of the bathroom floor where the paint was scraped off:
And while I was at it, I took a photo of what was left in the laundry room:
Saturday and Sunday I didn't take any photos. I came and checked on the paint often, and it was still pretty wet, but photos of wet paint aren't much more exciting than watching paint dry. Although come to think of it, it WOULD have been nice to have been watching paint dry, considering that what we did all weekend was watch paint NOT dry...
This morning I checked, and the paint on the kitchen terrace was dry, although rubbery and easily scraped off (like silicon or rubber cement), as on the bathroom wall. The shower wall was still wet, and I discovered that the handle was dripping. The paint on the floor in the laundry/shower room was still very wet. The paint under the bathroom sink was dry-ish, and the floor was of course dry, because the paint had been removed. This afternoon I called Mr. George and he and I looked at everything together. I showed him the dripping handle, and also that the bathroom sink tap was dripping, and that even the dry paint easily rubs off. He said yes, he knows, they did a bad job, but there's nothing he can do because he already paid them. HE ALREADY PAID THEM???? Personally, I think that shows a distinct lack of...forethought, at the very least. Anyway, we discussed what to do about the bathroom floor (he wants to retile half of it with a tile-high step running across the middle of the bathroom. I said NO. We're still considering options.) and he said that at this point, we should just wait for everything to dry, and next week they will come and re-do the paint, which will dry quickly if the concrete is dry. I said that that is maybe okay for the walls, but NOT for the floor. He's still thinking about things.
So anyway, this afternoon, in the middle of all the other regular Monday activities (Elisabeth's drama class was cancelled, at least--she loves her class and I love her class, but it was helpful today not to have it, not to mention also helpful that Lukas, Katie, and Helen had a party at Discoveries, so were gone for two hours instead of one and a half), we moved back into the house. And...I put on a load of laundry.
And...I decided to check to see if there was water leaking anywhere. There was.
Water all over the laundry room floor, AND outside on the kitchen terrace, and NOT coming from the washing machine. (That is, the water had been in the washing machine and back out, but it was not coming directly from the washing machine and not a fault or problem with the washing machine.)
So I looked under the sink in the laundry room and saw this:
Outside, there was dirty water everywhere, quickly covering more and more of the terrace:
Closer inspection proved that for the drainage from the dishwasher, they'd cut a hole into the drain pipe from the laundry room (that's the vertical black pipe below) and stuck the dishwasher hose in and coated it with, yet again, silicon. It doesn't show up wonderfully on this photo, but those grey drips below the grey pipe are not bits of dried silicon, that's actually the water squirting out.
While I was taking these photos, a child came to tell me that the toilet was leaking. I went and had a look, and of course took another photo:
I texted back and forth with Mr. George. The plumber is coming at 10:00 tomorrow morning. I also messaged with a friend on Facebook whose husband I don't really know (I've met him twice, I think), but I do know that he speaks both Greek and English and is very practical and knows lots of things about construction and plumbing and such, and she said she thinks he can probably come over tomorrow morning, too.
No idea when the final installment of this saga will be...
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