A Ceiling Mess & A Tree in My Bedroom
January 31st, 2010 at 11:46 pm . Posted in My Life .Exactly 4 years ago we were living in freezing Rochester (NY) where we both attended RIT. We lived together with a roommate in an apartment only a few miles away from campus.
I was on campus in the computer lab working on a project. A few hours later I decided to take a break because I couldn’t really receive text messages in the lab since RIT is a brick school! I checked my phone and received messages from Tyler and our roommate that said something brief like,
“The ceiling in our apartment fell through!”
I had no idea what to expect or think since they both were not responding back to my messages. I quickly got my things together and left. That was the longest 4 minutes drive home… unsure of what to expect or think. Is the old lady downstairs okay? Are our things okay?! Every possible thing was running through my head about what could have happened. I arrived and left everything in the car and walked up to the door and saw this…
Then I walked up and saw all the damage to our things…
(and that’s not snow – that’s wall insulation)
It turns out that the pipes were frozen and burst. Luckily for us, our roommate was home when it happened and had to call the office to have them shut off the water. The smell was so bad! The management crew did a horrible job handling the job. They didn’t leave a drying fan to absorb water from the carpet. They left us with a hole in the ceiling for days until they fixed it. And it took them weeks to replace the carpet.
This isn’t the first time I had my fair share of home disasters though. When I was younger we lived in Seattle and there was a really bad thunderstorm one day when I was at school. I thought it was an awesome day at first since the power was out and we were all playing games in the dark in our classrooms. I clearly remember the principal coming to my classroom and pulling me aside to tell me that my grandparents were on the way to pick me up because a huge tree fell on our house. I didn’t think anything too serious about it. I never really thought about asking my parents where exactly it had done damages to. I remember driving home with my parents and seeing that the impact was MY BEDROOM! There was a long branch poking down on my bed. For days after that I refused to sleep in my own room.
Have you ever experienced any house disasters like this or worse!? Do share!
February 1st, 2010 at 7:30 am
Ah! That’s awful!
My mom’s house has terrible trouble with ice dams in the winter, and when we moved into the house within a month the ceilings in the living room, dining room, bed room, office and bathroom all fell in. It was *awful* and while the ceilings haven’t fallen again we had to do battle with the ice every year. Brutal!
February 1st, 2010 at 7:43 am
YIKES!
my ex boyfriend m and i had come home one night to what sounded like rain. when we walked into the kitchen, we’d noticed the whole ceiling had caved, and SEWAGE was pouring into the kitchen/apartment. then we realized all the pipes were being held together by duct tape and we had a mold infestation.
it was so awful!
February 1st, 2010 at 8:52 am
Oh my goodness that’s awful!! One time I was renting a suite in a tri-plex and our study/dining room was underneath some not-so-good roofing, and in Winnipeg in spring, all the built-up ice melts HARDCORE. We developed a big wet patch and cracks down the ceiling… heading for the electrical socket in the ceiling, and RIGHT over our two desktop PCs. I was mortified as it grew bigger every day and the landlord took his sweet time in getting to it, but luckily the worst that happened was a bucket to catch the drips before he fixed everything up…
February 1st, 2010 at 8:59 am
Eh, I thought it was snow for real! Good thing your second post cleared things up!. My parents are snow birds, Back in the late 90s they left for Florida for the winter. I was asked to check in on the house from time to time. It had been raining for a few days. I had a can of soda and went to toss it in the recycling bin which is at the bottom of the basement stairs. Done it a million times “Open door, hands up, Shoots and Scores!” This time… “Winds up, Shoots and SPLASH”.. Our entire basement was in 3 feet of water. We had a completely furnished basement which doubled as a party room. Turns out overnite a pipe had burst. (familiar?) our sump pump which would have saved the day was shorted out by water rushing down the walls to the plug. Anyhooo few calls to the insurance company and restoration contractors removed all the water and almost all the furniture. Tools were all ruined due to rust. Eh it was a mess. Since then the basement has not been the same. All the stuff now is on bricks or something to keep it off the floor, no rugs. no joi’ d vivre.
Thanks for posting that story, It brought back memories of the parties and good times we used to have in the basement until….
Joey
February 1st, 2010 at 9:38 am
Wow, what a mess! I have never experienced any house disasters.
When I first saw the pictures, I thought it happened to your current house. That would have been even more aweful!
February 1st, 2010 at 11:50 am
Wow has it been four years already? That’s crazy! I never had anything ridiculous like that or any of the commenters, but a square foot or so of the ceiling in my room did collapse. I think it was because we had the A/C system right above it and it was leaking water all the time or something. But the crazy thing that made it actually collapse-collapse was not because of water only, but because a possum had gotten into the attic (we get animals in there all the time) and it fell and got caught in the hole while the plaster stuff came crashing down. I think this happened while I was at school because I remember coming home to seeing a hole in the ceiling and the possum in a giant trash can waiting to be deported to the bayou away from my house.
February 1st, 2010 at 12:35 pm
Oh my goodness how scary! I don’t even know what I would have done! Well besides cry like a baby. I don’t do well with stuff like that at all!
February 1st, 2010 at 2:19 pm
How terrible! I’ve never had anything like this happen, that I can think of anyway. The worst has been self imposed remodeling, but nothing like this!
February 1st, 2010 at 7:42 pm
I can’t believe this. Even if it was four years ago, I almost cried just LOOKING at the pictures! How terrible.
Nothing like this has, thank God, ever happened to me. Once some kids threw a fire extinguisher down the hall and it exploded, so we thought there was some crazy fire & I had an asthma attack… but… yeah, NOT THE SAME.
February 2nd, 2010 at 4:28 am
Nothing this bad!! WOW!
February 2nd, 2010 at 9:27 am
I`ve been lucky and never have had to deal with a house disaster – except for the boyfriend`s `renovations` . Those were fun…
February 2nd, 2010 at 12:28 pm
i remember the tree through your bedroom…
i might’ve even seen the hole… or it’s just my memory playing fact or fiction tricks on me.
February 2nd, 2010 at 12:45 pm
I was living by myself in an apartment, and about to move out in two weeks, when I heard a funny dripping sound. Water was coming in the laundry room from the apartment above. And it kept coming. And started in through the kitchen too. I called maintenance. Ran upstairs to check on the people from which it was coming and no one answered. (Apparently they were home and their laundry over-flowed. How could they not have taken care of that before it got so bad it was in my kitchen?!) So yeah, maintenance came out to turn off their water and start airing out my soaked carpets. In the middle of the night, chunks of my ceiling started to fall and my kitchen light was only hanging by 2 of 4 corners. Nothing was damaged, but yeah, I was glad I was moving out soon because this incident started a recurring mold problem in the cabinets.
February 3rd, 2010 at 4:37 pm
All of that insulation is making me itchy!
I can’t think of any major disasters, but now that we own I’m sure we’ll have plenty!
February 4th, 2010 at 3:57 am
Oh wow, and I thought I had it bad cos the landlord installed one of those SaniFlo toilets that makes this horrendous noise whenever you flush the chain or even run any water – including the shower – in the bathroom!
You must have been devestated when you saw that. Did you manage to salvage your stuff?
February 4th, 2010 at 7:59 am
Oh no thats awful.
Once the geyser in our apartment exploded (literally) – so we had no hot water for almost a week (it was horrible)
February 4th, 2010 at 9:49 pm
What a nightmare! We lived in an apartment before that had a similar problem with the pipes exploding when it got below freezing outside. The pipes were in the ceiling and weren’t insulated properly so we had a nice waterfall in our bathroom.
February 5th, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Yikes! I’m sorry, things like this are the worst. At least nobody fell through the ceiling.
February 6th, 2010 at 7:15 pm
Oh my goodness, that’s horrible! I can’t single out just one bad thing that’s happened to our house- but my hubby & I have a “fixer upper,” and we’ve definitely had our fair share of adventures in remodeling :)