Sobriety

Lest you get the idea that this blog is all twill and twee, I do have a rather sober post today. Or at least, I'm feeling in a sober mood.

I have a friend who told me that she only posts about positive topics and as such, her blog is always (I find this to be true as well), a delightful and relaxing read. But these couple weeks have been full of logistics, distractions and disappointments, none of which are fun to plough through. And yes, you can make lemonade but how do you wring out of yourself enough will to work harder?

I'm having one of those existential, is this all that there is, moments. Please God it will pass. This last week, or rather, some weeks ago but it took sometime to do anything about it, we started to discover discolouration on the study wall. This area is an internal balcony space, which I suspect, back in the colonial days, used to be an external balcony that got window-ed close. This showed up in rust brown patches on one wall and then along a low window-ed wall, there were light grey patches.

These walls were always uneven to begin with, as the building is old and many areas were less than finished and there had been a lot of rain of late that probably came through the big bay windows and seeped into the wall below. One day I decided to scrape away the paint and re-paint the whole area only to discover, lo, the thick paint (for there were at least three layers of previous colour from tenants who'd lived there before) simply peeled off the walls in large slabs and chunks. It ripped back in damp, sporish sheets and I watched the bald blistering patches grow with a rather helpless, sinking feeling.

This apparently, is what happens when water proofing is not well done and water seeps into walls, causing the wall (and paint with it) to expand and crack, or mould. In our case, the back of our mounted cork noticeboard had gleefully moulded all the way through and spread the mould to the rest of the wall. As for the other wall, well, who knows what really happened but it was, a mess. A huge mess. A flaky, dusty, unhealthy mess.

I don't know why that depressed me so much, after all, in a positive light, the new, fixed-up wall is so much better. I think it's because it was such a tired cause of inevitability and probably it also had something to do with the landlord's response. United Premas is the building manager for the government and although I respect that they are operating on minimal resources, they sent me a reply that in essence said it was not their responsibility and insinuated that they knew the units were prone to mould. Why then, I felt like asking, did you not think it was your responsiblity to fix the problem and not paint heavily over it and pass it on to the next tenant? There are young children who live in this building.

After a protracted exchange, they agreed that we could use their contractor to repaint, though we were responsible for any paint we wanted to use, should it be anti-mould paint. We also purchased and used our own anti-mould agents, which, for anyone curious, is essentially bleach and a lot of strong sunshine.

The question is, how does one make sunshine and lemonade out of such a scenario? There is no upside (really, no) and it doesn't remove my concerns about the remaining of the house nor the old state of other places we're trying to do up. These are all structural and quality issues that even in the renovation process, are not neccessarily apparent to the naked eye and yet these are the most important things about a building and an abode. It frustrates me that there is precious little the average home-owner can do about it, for who can be fully aware of these things or only afford to buy new? I never thought I'd say it but I'm sick of home-building, I really am.