The Beginning.

The primary purpose of this blog is to channel my frustration with my new condo into something somewhat constructive, and hopefully amuse some people at the same time. So, let's start at the beginning.

I recently bought a condo in Andersonville. In order to get a bigger space, and because I don't tend to look out the window much, I settled on a "garden" unit. People who have been in Chicago more than 12 days know that "garden" is simply a nice way to say "finished basement with its own door." So I knew going in that I would have to deal with any and all problems that basements tend to have, which usually boils down to the physics truism that water always seeks the lowest point possible.

Three weeks after moving in, a friend came to stay and slept in the guest bedroom. A couple of days after he left, my fiance and I noticed that the bed in there was completely soaked. There were no water marks on the ceiling, no dripping going on right then - totally weird. Well, you can't fix an error if you can't recreate it, so we just kept an eye on it.

A couple of days later we caught it - brown water dripping out of the ceiling vent. And yeah, it smelled like sewage. And it was soaking the futon, and soaking the carpet.

And that's how it began, 3 weeks after moving in.