Forum Archive: Posts by: gowanusaurus

The young son (recent college grad) of friends of my husband’s family, let’s call him “Joe”, has been staying with us for a few months while he gets on his feet and searches for a place to live in the NYC area. Joe pays us a few hundred dollars a month, basically just enough to cover the additional utilities usage of having another person under our roof. Right before I left for holiday travels, he asked if his younger brother could visit him for a few days over New Years, and I told him I wasn’t comfortable with him having guests in our home while my husband and I are away — the house is 125+ years old, mid-renovation and has myriad plumbing issues, electrical issues, and other potentially hazardous quirks — but maybe he could come another time. Joe then informed me that actually his brother had bought plane tickets and was already planning to come… so in the spirit of holiday cheer I acquiesced (my mistake).

Naturally things went from bad to worse. Joe’s little brother shows up, along with his girlfriend (surprise!), just as I’m returning from Christmas with my family and about to fly away for New Year’s with my husband’s family. Joe was nowhere to be found — turns out he was traveling for New Year’s, too, double-surprise! — and these two teenagers were going to be completely unsupervised in my house for 6 days. Soon after they arrived, and just before I left for the airport, the girlfriend took a shower in my upstairs bathroom and pointed the showerhead directly at the wall instead of down into the drain. This being a vintage Brooklyn bathroom, the walls are about as waterproof as a slotted spoon, and upon seeing a cascade of water come through the ceiling of the room below the tub, I had to run up there and yank her out of the shower and explain the problem to her. After a quick lesson in how to direct the water toward the drain, rather than all about the room, I said a quick prayer that my house would still be standing in a few days and then I left to catch my flight.

When I returned on New Year’s day, I found a 3′ by 3′ section of the ceiling in the room under the tub had collapsed, and everything below was waterlogged. The bathroom is directly over my kitchen, or more specifically, my pantry shelves, so I had to throw away at least a hundred dollars worth of groceries and a couple of small appliances (there was 2″ of standing water inside my toaster). Repairing the ceiling will probably be in the neighborhood of $800-1500, but it doesn’t really make sense to do it until I solve the problems in the bathroom above, so now I’m on a fast-track with that very expensive project, which I’d been hoping to postpone for another year. Anyway, sometime between completely losing my cool and throwing these two youngsters out on the street, I asked them for their parents’ addresses and informed them that they would be receiving an itemized bill for the groceries, the small appliances, and the ceiling repair. When good ol’ Joe returned from his vacation, I told him he would be sharing the cost of the repairs as well.

But now my husband thinks that they shouldn’t have to pay — his reasoning is that the house is very old, and under normal circumstances their actions wouldn’t have caused any damage, and we were eventually going to renovate both of the rooms affected anyway. And he is swayed by the same sense of obligation to these family friends that caused us to let these people into our home in the first place, so he doesn’t want to rake up trouble with them. I, on the other hand, want blood. Sure, the first time they caused the flood it wasn’t their fault, but to repeatedly damage the house in the very same way, over and over again in the course of several days, after they had been adequately warned, and when they are both sighted, sentient, intelligent beings with the capacity to recognize water leaking through the ceiling, or at least to notice when a large chunk of the ceiling has collapsed… and when I left them a list of emergency numbers and explicit instructions to call if they noticed any more problems with water leaking or anything else… c’mon, shouldn’t they at least share the responsibility of repairing the damage?

Has anyone else out there dealt with a similar situation? Is it fair to ask these jokers to pay up? If so, how much of the cost of the repair should I pass on to them?

(And, by the way, does anyone out there have an affordable place for “Joe” to live? He needs to move in ASAP; he’s a great roommate. HA!)