damp under foot
I’ll give you the summary:
- last weekend sometime: James notices a minor scurrying in the roof. Doesn’t think too much of it immediately, but will keep and ear on it.
- [scurrying gradually increases during the week]
- Wednesday night: James notices a fairly large bubble in the paint on the loungeroom wall, coming down from the ceiling. Only appeared in the last 24 hours, which presumes it was caused by recent rain. Email to real estate.
- Friday night: scurrying in the roof becomes much more obvious and large… almost possum sized. Email to the real estate agent.
And then tonight:
I arrived home about 15 minutes after Debbie, to find her in a little bit of a worried state about the corner of our lounge room. You see, there’d been some pretty huge rain the last couple of hours, a lot more around the Hornsby area than Toongabbie, seemingly. And driving home along Pennant Hills Rd was interesting as I drove through moments of aqua-plaining. As I drove home, I actually wondered how that bubbling on the wall would be doing after all this rain…
It hadn’t faired well at all. That bubble was bigger and was leaking and soaking the carpet, and a second bubble had appeared just beside it and was soaking the window-sill and saturating the curtains. We moved our DVD cupboard that was filled with DVDs no less than 6 hours before (thankfully, only minor dampness, and an hour in front of a fan has fixed that), and put some towels down to try and soak up the carpet a little. It’s stopped raining now, and so the leak has stopped. But if it rains again tonight, then it will leak again.
I’m pretty sure that the scurrying is a possum, and that the possum has dislodged some tiles in the roof, or damaged the roof in some way, about a week ago. So that has meant that any rain this week has leaked through into the ceiling. I’m glad I’m not the owner, cos this will surely cost a bit to fix.
Tomorrow I will be onto the real estate agent pretty much straight away. Our property manager won’t be in, but hopefully the Sunday admin person will deal with it promptly and not try and fob me off to Monday because it’s too expensive. In the end, it’s their property that’s gonna get further damaged the more they put it off.
Could be an interesting few days if this rain keeps up.
Oh, and this all after we’d pretty much just finished setting up the loungeroom – it was the most organised room in the house. It’s now very messy with chairs and DVDs everywhere! Oh well :)