Waterlogged – Friday 10 Nov 2006

After the Hash Chris and I came home, got changed and went to grab some dinner. We just went down to a little café near the apartment. On the way back we were deciding if we should go investigate a place we thought might be a bar up the road, but in the end we decided we were a bit buggered from the Hash so we’d just go home and try and find something on the 1000 channels of the TV (1000 channels and they’re all crap!).

Anyways, we’d been gone a little over an hour and when we opened the front door I could hear a tap running flat out. I thought maybe the bathroom tap was running, that I hadn’t turned it off properly when it was spluttering at me earlier… Then I looked inside and the floor was COVERED in water.

The kitchen, dinning and lounge room floors are all tiled (big stone slabs that look like marble) with ‘oriental’ rugs and mats and the whole main area of the apartment was about 3cm under water. The hot water cylinder had broken. We quickly turned off the tap (all the water was cold by this point) and I grabbed by laptop which lucky for me was sitting in its bag on the floor, but on a mat so the water hadn’t had a chance to soak through yet.

Then we started to try and find a way to clean it up. I also went down to get the security guys, so they could help us. In the end it took one the security guys and the owners son 45 minutes to push all the water into my bathroom and down the drain in the floor.

It’s just lucky that over here when they ‘mop’ the floors what they actually do is pour on loads of water and use a squeegee type thing to push the water to the drain. So they had these squeegee things and between the two of them they pushed all the water down the drain and laid the mats over the balcony rail. Actually it was REVOLUTING how dirty the mats were – black water was pouring off them.

All the chairs were soaked (water had soaked up the sides of all the couches), we have some little material footstools and two of them were drenched… I was also concerned about the sheer volume of water that was on the floor given the TV cables, the lamp cables etc…

They are coming back tomorrow to fix the hot water cylinder. Luckily Chris’s bathroom runs off a different cylinder so I’ll use his bathroom for a shower tomorrow.

The good thing to come from this waterlogged adventure is that the floors all through the main area are sparkling clean now!