I’m renting a tenement townhouse in Texas with serious quality issues. I’ve dealt with each one in turn but this latest one is a real head scratcher. Seems a mouse got into the space between the ceiling of the first floor and the floor of the second floor and chewed all the pipe insulation off the copper line from the air conditioner condenser to the cooling coils. The condensation on that cold copper pipe rolls down to the low point on the pipe and drips off — voila stain on the ceiling.
There’s a real nice maintenance guy who works for the management company but I sort of doubt he’s going to have a solution for this that will suit me. (And I don’t want to invite him in here to see what I did to the kitchen cabinets) What if I cut out that stained ceiling, reach in and pull off the damaged insulation and try to slide on a new piece? It’s impossible to patch and match an old popcorn ceiling. I’ve painted the ceiling of three rooms already and I’m tired. What if I just screw an air conditioner vent up there so if it still drips I can just position my goldfish bowl under it? Plus I’ll have access to set mouse traps up there for future troublemakers.
I’m restraining myself from ranting about how this happened in the first place to keep this post short.
Thanks for any ideas and advice,
Barbara
Here’s the whole story laid out in photos
http://picasaweb.google.com/beachton/RodentCeilingDilemma#
Replies
I'd say that the first thing to do is to get some mouse traps.
After that, the ceiling needs to come down so that the damage can be repaired (and it needs to be repaired in a rodent-proof fashion). Might as well make a big hole -- no harder to repair than a small one.
You could offer to pay for
Perhaps you could offer to pay for what you did to the cabs in exchange for a proper fix to this problem. It is the owner's responsibility to fix the pipe thing.
"What if I just screw an air
"What if I just screw an air conditioner vent up there so if it still drips I can just position my goldfish bowl under it? "
??? not following this part ... air conditioner vent??
My reaction is that if you don't dump this into the landlords lap, you could get bit down the road ... he could dump it into your lap for tearing into his ceiling and doing whatever. He may repair it under insurance since mice did the damage.
Yes, you can replace the insulation easily and at a low cost ... to mitigate further damage. I know nothing about your L & T relationship, but I'd have a tendency to let him know what is/has happened. Let him know that you are mitigating further water damage by replacing the insulation, but he should fix the situation. Maybe find where the mice are access the space and mitigate that, too.
Tell him the mice did the cabinets.
How did you take that picture?
Looks like floor trusses. How deep (height) are they?
20" trusses will give you about 17 of crawling space, if you can wiggle up in there. Taller trusses give you more room, but 20" ones are crawlabe for me, but I'm a skinny old man.
She took the picture through a can light hole, I gather. Crawling on drywall means you have to make like a spider and put your weignt on the bottom truss chord. When I was in college I worked with a skinny, wiry guy who could do this (only fell through twice!), but it's not something most can accomplish, in such a narrow space.