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The Story Of Why We Left Yafo P.6

Why did we Leave Yafo?

           Before our experience here with Yafo I really had no clue how harmful not building a house to code really can be to your health.  In this final chapter we will be discussing the alternate methods used to repair our home, the quality of craftsmanship, the apartment's impending doom, and the WAR on Shimon The Righteous Street.

       Like the house every picture here comes with a history of itself complete with an agonizing story of completely unnecessary stress.  The day we moved out our landlord had a contractor  come to our apartment to change the front door. The exact door that I continually asked him to fix for me, because it wasn't really much of a door it was more like fence with plastic and chicken wire  riveted to it.  My conclusion is that the landlord could not care less about his investment and the people providing him with the rent income and I am starting to realize that many landlords don't really care and most are money sucking liars. Out of the 4 landlords I've had in my lifetime, 2 of them have been the skivviest bastards I've known, 2 however have proven to be outstanding citizens. In MY experience that will mean on an international scale, fifty percent of landlords are jerks so watch out. 

This Video displays the quality of handiwork that went into the electrical wiring. 

     I repaired this crack twice by filling, sanding and painting it.  It however kept splitting open  which lead me to believe that the foundation of the 300 year old building was sinking. Which would make sense, the soil here is actually sand and the sand which the foundation of our apartment sits in is and not only sandy but continually wet. I always un-lovingly called our apartment a hole in the ground, maybe one day it actually will be...

      This is the lovely Southeastern facing window, lots of sunshine in the morning. Please notice the rocks and dust that have collected inside the window sill, as you can see in the above photograph. This mess is from the never ending construction site that is above and surrounding our home. Rocks, dust, nails, screws, saw dust, and chunks of wood collect here in the window sill. I swept them weekly trying to keep the dust to a minimum, but there was nothing I could do the dust and rocks just kept falling.. Did you  notice the lovely jail-cell appeal with the double barred window effect??? Alluring I know.

       This picture's story is a painful one, mostly emotionally pain but a few times I managed to physically injure myself on this annoying flaw. These are my bathroom tiles, if you look closely you may be able to see that the grout has broken out. Now if Mike Holmes were here we all know what he would say, but since I couldn't rip it out, my solution was again only a temporary fix. Repair it I did, over and over, the grout just kept popping out! Mike Holmes would have torn this whole apartment to the ground if he'd be given the chance, but alas there is no Mike Holmes to the rescue only me... So re-grout I did.

 

  ohhh the dent... 

 DO YOU SEE THE DENT ??????? 

 Roni, Rami whatever the dirty pirate's name was, he was probably the dullest they could have sent to fix the leaking shower that flooded our living room the floor below. He (the dirty Pirate) couldn't figure out why the shower rail wasn't fitting. Okay so I'm no contractor I'm not a trades-woman, just your regular crafty gal and I really have no clue what these parts are called so let's give them names to tell the story better. The dented silver piece that holds the doors let's call that the door rail, and the silver piece below with the screws let's call the wall mount. Okay?

shower screw 

shower screw 

First he attached the wall mounts to the wall by  lining them up with the shower basin. So when it came time to attach the door rail it did not to  fit into the wall mounts...  STRANGE.... what had happened? why didn't it fit? Where did I Go WRONG? I could read all the questions of confusion right off the dirty pirates dazed face. 

     I'll tell you what happened the rocket scientist had the instructions and didn't bother even looking at them. Rami's simple solution, "Ohh it doesn't fit... that must mean I need to bend to fit" (MUCH EASIER) I am sure the door rail was made with aluminum in it, 

because it was very light not the strongest. I looked on as he grabbed the door rail and began to push it over his knee attempting to bend it to the perfect arc.......  The dirty Pirate held the aluminum door rail with the convex side against his knee and began to push to "C" shape wider. I couldn't get the words out fast enough to tell Rami that I didn't think what he was doing was a good idea. I gasped in shock  while on looking as the weak aluminum door rail gave way under his strength. I couldn't believe that he actually thought he could bend the door rail to the perfect shape.  Rami had just dented the brand new shower we were finally getting installed! 

   The 'contractor'  is so slow at working that by the time that Maor got home from work Rami still has not attached the door rail and he really cannot understand why he is unable to. Maor takes one look at the instructions that came with the shower set and looks at what Rami has done in the bathroom, and he tells him he's installed the wall mount  pieces upside down. That just so happens to be the reason why the aluminum door rail didn't fit directly into place. Since the aluminum wall mounts that hold the glass had to be taken out and re-installed, my shower on the inside was filled with sharp, rough, jagged, empty, rusting screw holes because of Rami's complete disregard to how things work. I have provided  pictures so you can see exactly how barbaric the job was done (above on the right and the left) Every screw in the shower looked like this! 

  

      This my friends is what two showers look like when you lazily place one over the other, dirty pirate style. The original (the tile under the new shower) leaked due to the tiles being placed over top of 2x6s without the necessary supportive layers needed to tile properly over wood. (this is the reason for the tile grout popping out and the living room flooding) The old shower had leaked profusely every time we showered soaking our living room downstairs. We have yet another great idea if you like to cut corners and do things the cheap way.  So let me explain our lovely landlord's solution to fix Jack's mistake. Firstly they drilled a new drain hole, then they took a bucket of cement and filled the old drain and spread a nice thick layer over the floor and then they placed the new shower floor on top and they pressed down. It was like a big kids cut and paste project. I watched this all happen, exactly how they did it. It worked but it wasn't pretty and I really doubt that is how you are supposed to do it... I really have no clue, but with the amount of cement they used I think they guaranteed that the shower would never move. Jerry Rigged some miscellaneous pipe fixtures together and they finished all the plumbing seals with the same silicone that they sealed the leaky shower walls with. Again I don't think it gets cheaper than this... Please note the picture below, it displays the old drain and the new shower drain.  

Diagram explaining the flow of water leaking into the Living room

ahahahah Ouch.... painful memories of these guys...... The above pictures are two of many screws that I needed to hammer down, the spiky tips upstairs because we kept ripping our feet and socks open on them.. OUCH!!! There was probably 12 or more screws and that is what is holding the interlocking wood floor of our bedroom to the iron beams that support it. 

Beautiful light fixtures throughout, giving you that quality finished feeling. :D 

figure b    

figure a

This is the crumbling foundation that supports the story above us (see figure a). Not just small pieces quite large sized chunks  of rock started falling out of this hole. (figure b, c &d) The walls were literally falling apart from the inside out.... 

figure d

figure c 

  Ohhh our wood beam ceiling the icing on the cake, or the straw that broke the camel's back, whatever you wanna call it. If only the ceiling had been efficient enough to house us, I might have been able to live here ignorantly for another year. Our ceiling the very wood you look upon, at one point was the only ROOF over our heads. The renovations the floor above removed the old existing roof  leaving our ceiling to act as our ROOF. The construction team of dirty pirates removed the roof and didn't bother putting one back for about 2 months. During those 2 months living in a subtropical climate you are bound to get rained on, and we did it rained for days. As it poured down outside it rained down inside of my home. The front half of my house might as well have been outside, water poured through the cracks in the ceiling and down every supporting column and around the front 3 walls in my house water streamed in like waterfalls. Okay talk about night mare, my kitchen was a lake and no number of buckets, bowls, pots or pans could possibly hold the quantity of water cascading into my house. This is actually why it took me so long to post the sixth and final chapter of my rant, because I was determined to find the DVD with the video I took of the waterfall I had instead of a front door. I still cannot find it, I think the camera ate it.

     Thoroughly traumatizing let me tell you, there are very few times in your life where you feel this helpless and when your house is filling with water, there is really not too much you can do. The first night I mopped for hours with a big squeegee pushing the water out the front door but all of my efforts were lost as more water continued to inundate my home.  After the liquid assault was finished, my wood ceiling beams were drenched and because they had sat dry for hundreds of years before being exposed to the elements they had sponged up the water. Since the rains had halted construction had resumed, they rubber sealed my ceiling to start the floor above and put a roof on. The beams had not had time to dry out before being sealed from above the ceiling beams were holding so much moisture, they made the house feel cold and damp always. Anything you pulled out of the closet felt damn and as if had been sitting outside over night and the dew had set into it. EVERYTHING felt like this. The floods had turned my beautiful old wood ceiling into a giant humidifier that I couldn't turn off. Sadly it doesn't end here.

    If living in a jungle bog wasn't enough the ceiling had more ways left to torture us, and did it ever. Before being sealed, my beautiful ceiling was used as a construction site for some time allowing each gap between each board to be packed full of dust, dirt, rocks, pebbles, nails and screws. The ceiling had now been sealed with rubber from above for months and these items were a new precipitation leaking through the cracks of my ceiling. Every vibration brought a cloud of dust and debris from the gaps, for months I dusted like a Mad woman, trying to keep up with the constant onslaught from above. If the dirt and dust wasn't enough, then you'll love what's coming next.

     Having a vaulted ceiling with beautiful wood beams seemed like a dream, but the ceiling again contributed to so much unnecessary stress it really is quite remarkable. The 'construction' workers working above us were a pack of baboons, in order not to insult the Baboons of the world let's call them Dirty Pirates. The Dirty Pirates working on the project above us failed to ever finish installing a floor above our ceiling in the entire time we lived in Yaffo. Our landlord had promised that the floor was to be installed immediately after we moved in to reduce the noise of them working.  In the beginning we had an agreement with the Dirty Pirates, no noise before 10 am, and our landlord was still on our side at that time, he would not give them access to electricity until 10 am. They followed roughly to the rules for a couple months, but then as if the rules were lifted and as though we never existed, they began regularly working directly above where we slept, with a variety of tools. Every day I was awoken by the sounds of drills, jack hammers, sanders, circular saws, generators, compressors, heavy boot footsteps, Arabic radio stations, every hammer in the tool box, chisels, blow torches and arch welders, bobcats and backhoes, they would pound, drop, cut, burn, dig hammer, slam, drill, screw, sand, saw, throw, sing, yell, and break, everything wood, glass, iron, steal and tar. It felt like the dirty pirates would choose our apartment to work above and they had found a new electric outlet one that my landlord didn't control. The guy who owns the outlet told the Dirty Pirates they could use it whenever they wanted as long as they built him a kitchen....  Nothing short of war broke out upon neighbors and landlords on our street, and there was no more peace on Shimon the Righteous street. With nothing holding the Dirty Pirates back, they began work whenever they pleased, they'd start most days before 7am, if I was lucky sometimes they started at 8:30 am and some days they would work until 10 at night. I went berserk I couldn't sleep and when I cannot sleep I become very angry. The unfinished floor above our ceiling turned our apartment into a giant wood drum for the dis-symphony orchestra.  

   The lifestyle that Yaffo had brought us deteriorated me in every-way it could, we had finally had enough. I told my landlord off  like I've never told anyone off before, that day Maor gave him our notice that we were leaving and I finally felt calmed and a weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.

  OOOhhh One more thing... Meet the Death Block nicknamed that because in the event that it fell it would most certainly kill us..... if our heads were positioned under it and it just so happens that this is the last sight we saw before drifting off to sleep every night. The Death block was strategically placed over the only sensible place to put the bed upstairs. We slept every night with the block precariously positioned to kill. Let us just be grateful we survived Yaffo, with hopefully no long lasting effects.  I loved our apartment when we moved in and when the time finally came I loved moving out of it!   I've been living in my new home in Ra'Anana for over a year now and I am so seriously content with what I have here it's amazing how much the little simple things count . Our new Apartment is a little bit smaller, has zero history, it's a basement, and I LOVE IT! It's finished nicely, it's an open functional space, two bedrooms, one kitchen, one bathroom, one living room and I even have a storage space, good neighbors, a great land lady, fruit trees, peace and quiet and I even have where to put my plants. There is no history of leaks, flooding, or infestation and certainly no dirty pirates and their dirty construction!  

     This is why we left Yafo !