New phrase for your vocabulary “stack living”
In a condo, you are part of a stack. All of the units directly above and below you share a common water line. If someone needs to have the water turned off to have something repaired or replaced, they may turn off all of the water for that stack.
We are in the ’05 stack of Building A. 205A,305A,405A you get the picture. Seems like this designation would only be used in the rare event that water is turned off but often when people ask where you live, they ask which stack.
Kind of like we are at Hogwarts.
Sometimes when I say we are in ’05, people are a little too quick to assure me it’s a nice stack.
Concern mounting that ’05 might be Hufflepuffs.
Stack living requires rules since what you do and when you do it affects other people. You can’t nail pictures at night; if you are having loud repairs like tile being pulled up you need to notify your neighbors etc. And as Handsome Husband points out rules are the only thing that separates us from the animals.
Washing your deck or doing heavy duty plant watering for instance can cause problems. Each deck has little drain holes so that the rain can run out. At the last HOA meeting we were reminded that if you are going to mop your deck or do heavy watering you need to plug up the drain holes then go get the wet dry shop vac and vacuum up the water. This is to avoid pouring water onto the head of your neighbor downstairs who might have chosen that very moment be sunning themselves.
Mental note made: plug up drain holes and get wet vac. BUT we are above the bike room and don’t have downstairs neighbors so that mental note was more of the dry erase variety.
This morning in a rare burst of domesticity, I decided to mop the deck. As I did, the water started to drain out.
I toyed with idea of plugging the drain holes by fashioning a plug of my own design made from wine corks and tin foil but figured that would send me down a Pinterest rabbit hole so abandoned it in favor of a small transgression.
In my defense, I knew it wasn’t going get someone wet while they were sitting on their deck and it was just draining into the nearly empty parking lot.
The water drained into the parking lot and ran into an empty parking space. An empty parking space that moments after I finished mopping became occupied. Literally the one space in the lot with the evidence of my rule breaking and a car drives up and parks in it.
The guy got out of the car and looked at the water in his space and followed the trail across the lot to below the 05 stack then looked at me standing on my deck. (I had had the presence of mind to drop the mop out of sight as soon as I heard the car but figured running inside was a little too obvious.)
“Looks like there’s some water coming from a deck in your stack”
Me looking skyward to the condos above me with my Hufflepuffiest face: “Huh, seems like a funny day to be watering plants….it’s supposed to rain.”
* obfuscation: direct suspicion towards a rogue plant waterer not a deck mopper
“Well, if you see who’s doing it, be sure to remind them to use the shop vac. They could get fined.”
Passive meet aggressive.
And I looked it up. I can’t get fined.
The Condo Chronicles 