Apartment life - major renovation

After writing the original post, I have edited it with what else happened in italic.

There are always things that are good and bad about living in an apartment building, and something that is hard to deal with is when there is a major renovation that needs to be completed. The latest in our building is they are replacing the pipes in the various risers in the building. It is something that doesn’t happen very often so that is good but when it does, it can mean some major impact on how you do things, especially when you work from home.

Here are the steps that are involved in replacing the pipes in our riser and the estimated length of time is between 2 and 3 weeks, so yes lots of noise and dust.

1. Remove all the items from around the sinks and from underneath each of them. For us, we have the kitchen sink, and two bathroom sinks, so lots of stuff that needs to find a new home until the work has been completed.
2. Someone will come into your unit and break the wall in each of these cabinets so that the plumbers can have access to the pipes. This means big open holes that let dust and other things into the unit. Our super recommended that we tape bags over these three openings, so that is what we are doing.
1. the building had to shut off the water for the entire building (Wednesday) to replace a value which was a connection to the city water, and it was scheduled from 8-5 or until work was completed. Well, this didn't go as planned, and we ended up being without water for around 20 hours, which wasn't good.
2.  Friday afternoon (around 12:30 pm) there is a knock on the door, and we are notified that there has been a flood in the main bathroom on the 18th floor, and we are on the 10th floor. We clean up the water on the floor and move the rug from the hall, but again not bad, or at least that is what we thought. Well, the water besides coming out the opening of the cabinet also went through the wall and into the closet behind the bathroom which is our main walk-in closet. This results in the water in the closet and getting stuff wet there, and then it goes into the bedroom and soaks our area rug, which we had to move. This issue was discovered around 11 pm when we were getting ready to go to bed. We had to move all the stuff off the floor in our closet and even a few things in our bedroom. We spent some of the weekend cleaning up and trying to figure out if we had lost anything, but after two days of going through stuff, we think we only lost one paperback book.
   
3. The plumber will come into your unit and work on replacing the pipes and shut off valves
1. This was scheduled for the following Tuesday, and it meant that we would have people coming and going for most of the day, which we sort of figured out. Well the water pipes in our kitchen were connected directly to the main line so that meant that they had to also replace our kitchen facet. This was not something that we knew was going to happen, but at least now the facet shouldn't leak.
   
4. After the plumber is finished, someone else will come in and repair the drywall.
1. This work is over two days, so it has been a challenge to get things done with people coming and going for four days straight.
2. The drywall and painting were supposed to happen on a Thursday and a Friday but they informed us on the Thursday that they might not be able to do the paining on Friday so it would happen on the Monday.
   
5. Finally, be able to put everything back under the sinks and clean up all the dust and stuff that has been left behind.
1. After lots of vacuuming and mopping we were able to start to put things back into the cabinets which is good. One thing that I did notice that the space in the cabinet under the sink in the bathrooms has gotten a little smaller because they put an additional layer of drywall on it.
    

So those are the steps that need to be taken to get the new pipes into all the units and besides that it means that given they are working on the pipes there is no hot or cold water on these lines from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm each day until the work is done. We have normal water on the weekends which is good but ensuring we have water to drink is something that we have to remember.

This is something that each of the risers in the building are going to be dealing with, so that means that there is going to be lots of dust and noise involved. At least once our riser is done, we can get everything put back where it belongs and not have to worry about it again, or at least we hope we don’t. So yes, there can be challenges of living in an apartment building, but when things work it is great, and I don’t mind when there are these repairs because it means that the building management cares, and they want to fix something before it becomes a major issue.