Trials of a Louisville 800 Apartments Resident

Last Post

2011-12-13T08:25:00.000-08:00

Barring any other major developments, this will probably be my last post on the 800 building. Amazingly enough, this weekend (the 10th of December), I received my deposit. I moved out in July.

It was even more impressive for my girlfriend; she moved out in April, and got her check on the same cold December day. I suppose the final point of the story is that not everyone at the building is bad, or a problem. They just have, how shall I say, "administrative issues" in the office.

I was seriously considering filing a lien against the building for my deposit though, if only for the comedic value. Who in their right mind files a lien against a twenty million dollar building over a $250 deposit? Alas, I won't have the chance now.

You don't know what you've got...

2011-09-09T12:47:00.000-07:00

... 'til it's gone. In the case of the 800 building, a more appropriate version would be "you don't know how bad you had it until you leave". Even having lived in a lot of other places, it still surprises me just how many niggling irritations I had to deal with that I never noticed before:

- the shower has water pressure

- I can actually adjust the shower water temperature, and have yet to be frozen out or overheated

- the front door has a deadbolt, and it's impossible to lock your keys in the apartment

- there's a nearby tennis court I can safely practice kung fu forms in

- the workout room actually has working equipment in it

- there's never a line at the laundry machine

- I don't have to take an elevator to get to the laundry room

- I don't have to take an elevator to get to my car

- There are no drafts and I have central AC/heat

- it's quieter. Much, much quieter.

- basically instant freeway access to I-71

- no bums asking for change

It's not all guns and roses though:

- at the new building, I have to walk half a block to take out the trash

- my girlfriend is a block away, instead of two flights of stairs

- the kroger is not within walking distance

Nevertheless, I'm really glad I moved.

Deposits

2011-07-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

It's been over two months since my girlfriend moved out, and she has yet to receive her deposit back. Apparently it was 'in the mail' some time last week. Perhaps the postal service here is unusually slow, after all we're talking about at least three miles between the two apartment buildings. Or perhaps there is a more mundane reason.

YMMV.

Moving

2011-06-23T07:28:00.001-07:00

I'm moving out next month, across town to a place that actually has a pool, pool table, and weight room. Yes, it costs more for less space; but not tremendously more, and not tremendously less space. My girlfriend already lives in a different apartment at the complex, and so far things seem to be more than fine.

In some ways I'll miss this building, like I've missed most of the places I've set up camp at for an extended period. All things considered, it's been pretty good to me - I've not had any major explosions or issues that really screwed things up. There have been plenty of inconveniences though, and I don't look forward to another chilly winter here with heaters that aren't up to spec.

On the plus side, the smaller location means I get a head start on reducing my footprint. I gotta start throwing out useless crap now, which means there will be less to deal with for the big move next year.

Flooding

2011-04-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

As if on cue, the pipes several floors up have exploded once again. My girlfriend's apartment was waterlogged this morning, so she came down and cooked breakfast on my stove. She moves out next week.

Temperature Regulation

2011-04-09T16:28:00.000-07:00

I've always dimly registered that it was a problem, but I'm starting to come fully to terms with just how big a deal it is to have proper temperature regulation in an apartment. Every spring and fall, when the temperature falls and rises chaotically, there's a few months where my sleep suffers. These apartments have only wall mounted units (and we're not supposed to run the electric heat if we can avoid it), so there's not a huge amount of temperature regulation available.

Most of the other places I've lived had solid central heat/cooling. I'm starting to long for that again.

Blackout

2011-01-09T16:25:00.001-08:00

We had another set of power failures last night due to the cold weather. The building isn't very well insulated, and on really cold/windy nights the hot water heat simply can't keep up. To keep from freezing, people turn on the electric heaters in the window A/C units.

The problem is that the building was not wired for electric heat. So everyone turns on their A/C heaters, the transformer in the hallway overheats, and the breaker for the floor trips. After half an hour or so, the transformer has cooled off and they can reset the breaker.

This really wouldn't bother me a whole lot but for two things: 1) Rebooting my computers sucks - a lot. And 2) I never use the electric heat because I actually took the time to insulate my apartment, so I'm being unfairly penalized by those who do.

Really though, what needs to happen is to redo all the windows and A/C unit junctions so they don't leak cold air. Ideally, I'd like:

- all double pane windows
- fix the seals on the sliding doors (and fix the sliding doors)
- change the window separators from solid, thermally conductive aluminum to something that at least stands a chance of being insulated
- reseal and/or rework the A/C units so that they don't bleed cold air into the apartment

Honestly though, they probably won't bother even fixing up these apartments, as we're on the lower floors and there's less money involved. Basically, the rabble live down here where I live, and I gather there's not much incentive for them to improve things.

Update

2010-11-02T10:02:00.001-07:00

I suppose it's time for an update.

We finally have new laundry machines. At least they are reliable, which is a plus.

There was some major snafu upstairs in the management side. We had a couple of staffing changes, and apparently no-one bothered to renew my lease. There was a paniced 'please renew' a few days ago; I compared the new lease against the old and helped them fix a bunch of the typos and missing sections in it.

They finally turned on the building heat, to discover that my girlfriend's apartment had a major pipe break in it (the building is hot water heated.) I've had three days of wet stinky carpet as a result, but it's finally starting to dry out now.

If it wasn't so cheap (I'm on grandfathered rent) and such a pain in the ass to move, I'd be living somewhere else. The only thing that keeps me here is inertia.

That's about it.

Laundry

2010-03-16T14:40:00.001-07:00

The laundry room has sunk to new lows in terms of available machines. There's 9 washers, but only about four of them seem to be functional at any given time. Most of those are obviously damaged in some way.

In some ways it seems like we're making progress, but in others not so much.

Vacation

2010-03-02T06:09:00.000-08:00

I've been out and away from blogging for a while, and a lot has happened in that time.

For starters, I had a meeting with the building manager shortly after my previous post. She's a nice lady, very personable and charming. I'm sure she's well trained in how to convey positive impressions, but even so, I got the feeling she's up to her ears in stupidity when it comes to building maintenance.

She actually had my laundry list of issues in one of those stand-up wire paper holders when I got there. It looked well used and had been highlighted and scribbled on extensively. We went over most of the stuff on it and she talked about the plans and progress on each.

The real problem though is that the building needs money to be renovated, but it needs renters for money, and needs renovation for renters. This is one place where I could see raw capital investment making a big difference.

Since then, various other problems have arisen with the building, but other issues have largely been fixed:

- the heat finally appears to be under control. Except for the coldest days, the heaters are finally cranking out enough heat to keep my apartment warm, though this is with massive cold barriers still in place.

- I had a massive kitchen sink drain and overflow issue, where the pipes draining my kitchen got completely fouled up for a couple of days. I didn't lose anything important, but the cleanup sucked. The maintenance staff did a good job, but even they were near wits end with it. I know how bad plumbing can be; I don't envy what they had to go through to clear the system.

- the elevators have been working properly for the last two weeks. The elevator company replaced the cabling for one of them, but there's still some mechanical weirdness that crops up from time to time. My girlfriend got stuck in one for 20 minutes until maintenance could drop down from above and manually force the door open.

- the laundry room is still hosed up, with a couple of washers having been dead for the last month or longer. The laundry room flooding issue appears to have been resolved for the moment.

There's still a long uphill battle ahead, but there seems to be forward progress. The worst part of it is going to be regaining the faith of the inhabitants; quite frankly, attitudes about the building are not positive.

I think the worst part for me is that I don't see an easy way out of it for the building owners - they're going to have to spend money, and that's all there is to it. I'd personally recommend that they begin renovating one empty apartment per month on the upper floors. Install double pane glass and rework the outer walls, and redo the kitchen and bathroom.

Granted, it will be expensive, but this adds one very rentable apartment per month. These upgraded apartments will also have about half the heating bill of the others. The only problem with this is that I'd guess the payback time to be 2-3 years if you could keep the apartment full; in short, it requires forward investment. There's also the risk that you couldn't keep the apartment full due to things like hot water failures.

I guess we'll have to see.

Plumbing Redux

2010-01-13T12:35:00.000-08:00

Today has not been a good plumbing day. I've narrowly averted disastrous overflows several times using either the bucket or garbage disposal method; there's no point in calling the maintenance guy, because it would just take him away from fixing the actual problem, and he'd just do the same thing I'd do anyway. I consider it my small sacrifice to help out.

I was not so lucky a few minutes ago, and I ended up with probably a gallon or so of stinky sludge water on pretty much everything in the kitchen. I've got it mostly mopped up and taken care of for the moment, but I'm pretty sick of it. So, being the MacGyver that I am, I have a temporary workaround.

I put the plug in the drain, stuck a tin can on top of it, and put a weight-lifting weight on top of it. The hole diameter is about 3 inches, and the weight is about 12.5 pounds, making for about 1.8 psi rejection, or about four feet of water column. This isn't a huge amount, but it should stop incidental seepage and should at least limit the impact when a surge hits.

I really hope this shit gets fixed soon.

Plumbing

2010-01-12T12:44:00.000-08:00

Maintenance spent the majority of the afternoon trying to snake out the plumbing that leads to my kitchen sink drain. Apparently things are pretty bad; it really has been all afternoon, and they only started making progress a few minutes ago. For a while, I was concerned that it might overflow the boundaries of the sink; I had the trash can ready to start bailing to the bathroom if necessary.

On the downside, my sink is full of sludge that really does not smell very good.

On the plus side, this will hopefully clear up the weirdness with the sink occasionally gurgling itself full of foam for no apparent obvious good reason.

Power Failure

2010-01-08T19:40:00.001-08:00

Louisville recently got hit by a major snowstorm (major for here, a 'light dusting' for most other places I've lived) and the temperature dropped substantially. As the temperature dropped, people got cold - so they turned on the electric heat.

As a result, the power went out last night. The hallway lights were still on; but the apartments in multiple floors were out. Too many electric heaters were on, and the mainline breaker downstairs tripped. After about an hour, the power came back on.

Half an hour later, it went out again.

An hour later, it came back on. Half an hour later, ... you probably get the idea at this point.

Some time around midnight, it came on for good, though what they had to do to manage it is unclear to me.

This afternoon, maintenance was going around to each apartment to clean the filters in the hot water radiator headers. The plan is to improve the hot water heat, so that there's less load on the electric heaters. So far, it seems to be working, in that my apartment is a good 2-3 degrees warmer than it used to be.

None of this takes into account that the patio door is drafty as hell, and sheets of ice cold air slough off the windows to practically cover the floor in a layer of ice. While improving the heaters will help, the core problem of the windows being insufficient remains unaddressed.

Louisville New Year

2010-01-02T10:06:00.000-08:00

It is freezing in here. A steady stream of cold flows from the windows down the inside of the blinds, and coats the floor in a two foot thick layer of 40 degree air. The heater points upward, and toward the ceiling the temperature is a balmy 70 or so. It's not even windy out; it's simply colder than the operating capacity of the building.

Ironically, this is a better situation than if I turn on the overhead fan. Within an hour, the fan would have the temperature equalized pretty much floor to ceiling; yet at that point the entire place would be below 60 degrees. At least as things are now, you don't freeze when you're standing, and my bed is about four feet off the ground so I sleep well. If you wear thermal underwear on your lower half, it helps tremendously.

On the plus side, I can do most of my work from the bedroom, and the bedroom is buttoned up a lot tighter than the living room. It has a lot less glass, and the curtains I have are very solid and drag the floor. Coupled with a barrier of storage boxes and furniture to keep the cold air overflow contained, I can actually keep the bedroom at a reasonable temperature. If I keep the door closed.

Xmas Flu

2009-12-26T07:26:00.000-08:00

It never fails: I get an extended vacation, therefore I get sick.

It also seems to never fail that when I'm sick, there's no hot water in the bathroom. I was able to take a bath last night so it's not a complete disaster, but I could sure have used a hot shower this morning. Alas, it was not to be.

I don't even have any attack vectors for how I got this one - my entire contact with the outside world since Wednesday has been leaving my apartment to visit Fionna, who has been playing video games pretty much the entire time.

The only things I can think of are food poisoning, or maybe the kids next door are sick and it's air transmitted.

I love Louisville

2009-12-22T17:53:00.000-08:00

Actually, I think I would pretty much love anywhere I lived. I even really like this apartment, other than its minor weirdnesses and occasional major problem. On that front:

- My bathroom finally got painted. They didn't sand it down well enough, but the paint covers it acceptably. The painter didn't use any drop cloths or masks, but it doesn't look like he splattered anything of importance this time.

- It's been either warm or not windy for pretty much the last week. Either way, with the modifications I made to the apartment, I've been able to keep the temperature downright balmy in here. Hopefully this will last through the rest of the winter.

- I think my neighbors belong to a cult. They're from India, so I understand there may be various rituals that differ from ours - but their volume and frequency have become somewhat alarming. It's like those horror story exposee's you expect to see on TV:

"Louisville Indian Death Cult Massacre! Innocent bystander in neighboring apartment killed in blood ritual"

I love these elevators

2009-12-16T08:47:00.000-08:00

This morning, elevator number 1 was on the fritz again. I've never seen this kind of failure mode before; it was sitting at the lobby floor, repeatedly opening and closing its door on about a ten second cycle. It was doing this when I started my laundry; and it was still doing it when I was finished. It's probably still going right now.

On the plus side, I saw the washing machine guy come in to work on the washers, so perhaps we'll get number 3 and number 6 working again. It's good that the building is only a quarter full; if we were at max capacity, the only way to get an empty washer would be to do laundry at 3 am.

In other news, the weather has started to get pretty cold, but other than a difference of 20+ degrees between the floor and ceiling the internal heat is keeping up. The tap water in the bathroom is also unusually hot - so I suspect someone turned up the temperature on the main boilers downstairs. It's a much needed change.

Ahh, winter

2009-12-12T08:35:00.001-08:00

The last few days have been interesting. It's been pretty cold, which isn't a huge problem on its own; as long as it's dead calm outside, you draw all the shades properly, and you don't turn on any fans, the temperature in the apartment stays livable. Uncomfortable, but livable.

Unfortunately, the wind has been blowing like crazy. I never realized before now the sheer level of draftiness here. Perhaps I was simply not looking for it before.

There are of course the obvious candidates of the sliding glass door and the seals around the heating units. But the real surprise was the kitchen: apparently the space behind the dishwasher and garbage disposal is connected directly to the large utility space between the walls. That utility space is cold as hell and the wind pushes it all into the kitchen.

It never really occurred to me to block off the kitchen of all places, but doing so has helped the heat situation a lot. Just another helpful tip from an 800 building resident!

Broken elevator

2009-12-09T16:41:00.000-08:00

Elevator number 1 is stuck at the third floor. With both elevators working, the wait time in the lobby is typically about ten seconds. With one of them stuck, the wait time is typically two minutes.

It's been stuck there since Sunday.

Problem report and review - no hot water

2009-12-09T09:06:00.000-08:00

And now that all the initial and fun stuff has been posted, we get to my first review and problem report for the building.

If you like taking showers with hot water, live somewhere else.

The hot water is out in the shower today. This seems odd in that the hot water for the bathroom sink was for the first time I can remember too hot for comfort last night.

I can handle the hot water in the shower being out once or even twice a year for scheduled maintenance. However, this is at least the tenth time this year I've unexpectedly not had hot water. (Note that by 'hot', I mean 'not freezing'. The water here is never actually 'hot'.)

Natural Disaster Photos, 800 Style

2009-12-09T08:59:00.000-08:00

One of the good things about living here are the natural disasters. The 800 building is extremely well placed in that regard; the disaster comes, the disaster goes, and for the most part the building is unaffected. The building power is on the underground high voltage grid that also serves the nearby hospital complex, so power failures are incredibly rare.

Here are a couple of links to disaster pages I put up in the last year or so. Both of these were really fun to be in, and the only inconvenience was that I had to move a friend's car from the lower level of the garage to the upper level during the flood.

The August 2009 4th Street Louisville Flood

The January 2009 Louisville Ice Storm

There was also a massive wind storm a while back when part of a hurricane made it this far inland, but I didn't think to take pictures at the time. There wasn't a huge amount to see either, which was disappointing given that a quarter of a million people ended up without power. The 800 building power didn't so much as flicker the whole time.

Why this Blog

2009-12-09T08:49:00.000-08:00

When I first saw the 800 Building, I pretty much fell in love with it. I'm an electrical engineer, and I've got a soft spot for buildings made out of glass, concrete, and iron. I love the location, and the built in parking garage. I do not want to leave.

However, the building has problems. A lot of them. And if you're considering a place to stay in downtown Louisville, I'd recommend you think twice about saying here. This web page chronicles the problems I've run into living here, and I'll keep updating it so long as I can stand to remain here.

I maintain this page in the feeble hope that management will do something and I won't have to move somewhere else. As I said, I really like the building, but recent events are just ridiculous.