my kitchen, and the room that's supposed to (eventually) be the laundry room are in utter disarray at the moment.

have i told this story before? here's the synopsis: when we bought the place, the owners claimed there was a rough-in for a washer-dryer set in the little room by the kitchen they were using as a storage closet. that didn't at all influence whether or not we would have bought the place, but i didn't really give it much thought, since, after having bought a house, it was rather unlikely that we would have any money left over to buy a washer-dryer set, particularly since my tuition this year is outrageous.

however, my in-laws came to visit, and while they were here, they bought us a washer and a dryer. ridiculously generous of them, to say the least. the machines were scheduled to be delivered several weeks later, and when they were, we cleared out the storage closet and my sweetie attempted to install the set, only to discover:

1) the "pipe" that's supposed to feed water into the washer is about 0.25" in diameter, meaning that it would take approximately 50 years to fill the washer.

2) there was no standing pipe in which the water was supposed to drain from the washer. there was just this corrugated hose that runs a convoluted path through the kitchen cabinets and just ends right under the kitchen sink. meaning, of course, that if we were to have hooked up a washer to it, after it had taken 50 years to fill with water, it would drain into our kitchen cabinet, onto the kitchen floor, and quite possibly the apartment below us.

3) the dryer electrical was piggybacked off of the stove.

4) the washer electrical was piggybacked off of the microwave.

when this was further investigated, it was found that, rather than run a cable behind the drywall and through holes in the studs, the installer had simply gauged this curved trench in the drywall and embedded the cable into it.

first class.

my sweetie's intial plan was to smash through the concrete kitchen floor with a sledgehammer and run proper piping under the floor. he called our realtor to ask where exactly our property ends and where the property of the dude below us begins.

turns out his property ends at his ceiling...but ours ends at our floor. the gap belongs to the strata council, with whom my sweetie had already had a previous run-in. suffice it to say that we decided not to put ourselves in a position to have to deal with them again. anyway, when the realtor found out what a shoddy job had been done with the installation, he kind of went crazy and said that he wanted to take the previous owner to court, how the whole thing is "mickey mouse" and how all fire fighters were useless (the previous owner was a firefighter, to put that last comment in some context, but i guess it would have been marginally funnier if i'd left it unexplained.) my sweetie did his best to discourage any kind of legal action, but the realtor was insistent that we keep all of our receipts and get reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses. turns out it wasn't the previous owner's shit-installation job, after all, but because they signed some sort of disclosure form about alterations to the property, they're still paying for the cost of materials.

strangely enough, the previous owners' realtor called us, saying that the previous owner's father had died and he'd made the coat rack by our door. they then offered to pay "any amount" for it. we said just to pay for our washer dryer installation and not worry about it.

wow. this isn't a synopsis at all.

point is, we had to run the pipe behind the stove and dishwasher. both appliances were pulled out and this morning, my sweetie flooded the bottom kitchen cabinet after discovering that he couldn't shut off the cold water supply to the sink. he's going to try freezing the part of the pipe with dry ice, cutting it, the capping it.

what should have been a straightforward plug-and-play installation is turning into quite the gargantuan mess. i'm looking forward to being able to use my stove again. i don't even care about the washer and dryer anymore, excpet that they're currently taking up space in our living room.