It's the Little Things

It has been a very exciting day!  Not because a lot of things have happened, but because one very important, very basic thing happened.  My shower is now tiled!!!!  EEK!!  I'm really happy about it :)

You're probably thinking one of two things: why is that such a big deal or what did your shower have before tile?

I'll answer the latter. It had nothing.  Ok, ok, not nothing.  I mean there is a wall.  Mercy, goodness, there is definitely a wall.

There just happened to be nothing to deflect the moisture.  Aka, the walls were basically painted drywall.  With no ventilation, other than leaving the door open to the shower once in a while, the room was having some serious issues.  And these serious issues were multiplying.

When I first arrived the bathroom was painted, and looked nice and fairly clean.

After a month or so though, the paint started to peel off the walls and mold started to grow.  Yes, pretty gross, but I did my best to at least get rid of the mold.  The cleaning sprays would reduce the mold for a little bit resulting in more paint coming off than mold.

The neighbor directly beneath us also came us a few times to complain that she was getting water in her apartment from our's.  One time, she even took Suz down to her apartment and made her climb on a stool just to look at the water stain she had on her wall.

Then, when I returned from my Christmas/New Year's trip, I discovered that our kitchen was mysteriously flooding.  So I called my dear friend Evelina, and she called my landlord for me.  He came the next day and decided it was coming from the washing machine.  So he came back the next day to replace the water line.

But the flooding came back, and eventually, Suz and I discovered that water was seeping into the wall of our shower (from a very large crack in the drywall and the crevice where grout used to line our tub) through the wall and out through our kitchen tiles!

I called Evelina again, and she graciously relayed the problem.  But nothing happened.  Then this week, our downstairs neighbor paid us another visit.  Her water stain had grown it seemed, but when Suz explained that it was a problem for us too and that we had already called our landlord, she become quite understanding.  Raising her fist slightly, she assured Suz that she would call them and "shout at them." No worries, "discussions" in Russian tend to be pretty loud.

Wednesday we received a message that Sergei would be coming to tile the shower Saturday, and we couldn't use the shower after Thursday afternoon.  This afternoon, when I returned from the kid's club I've been helping out at, I found Sergei hard at work laying the tile.  The tiles don't all match, and the shower isn't fully lined, but it's a major improvement!