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Last Updated: 02.07.2025 01:53
Yeah yeah, I know. We're both morons.
The door was closed, but my eyes practically fell out of my skull when I saw a dark rim of wet carpet right outside the door.
I did not turn it off.
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See, here was my thought process. Water flows towards salt, baking soda is salt, dump baking soda on carpet, baking soda absorbs the water, then I can just vacuum up the baking soda, right?
Number one, I knew maintenance would probably take a week to get here regardless. Two, how the fuck am I gonna tell the maintenance worker that I went for a run and left the tub running and that's why this happened?
We're Costco guys, so of course we had a ten pound bag of baking soda at the ready.
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I return, let the dog off the leash, take my shoes off, etc. I walk into the room and realize I can hear something, the muffled woosh and splatter of water coming from the bathroom.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, or berate myself for being such a goddamn idiot.
I wanna tell him, “Actually, kind sir, we're really gonna need a blower in here, because I know exactly how this happened.”
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At the time my husband and I were living in an apartment near the beach, I liked to call them faux-luxury apartments because while they looked upscale, and their pricing was certainly upscale, their maintenance and general level of quality was absolutely awful. It took weeks, if not months for maintenance requests to be acknowledged, most of our issues were “solved” by someone showing up, saying some variation of “I'll be right back to fix this,” then proceeding to be ghosted until we put the next request in.
Don't leave the tub running while you're running.
I let my embarrassment get the best of me, and decided I'd insist on getting this fixed myself.
He walks in, and he's utterly flabbergasted.
And I'm an idiot, so of course I dump the entire bag of baking soda onto the closet carpet.
Roomba did not finish the job.
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The entire bathroom floor was drenched. The tiles looked like the bottom of a freshly emptied pool, ripples erupted under my feet with every footstep as I rushed to the tub to shut the water off.
We had a broken window for over a year that was literally just never fixed no matter how many times we called them about it, our elevator key reader stopped working so their solution was to just open the elevator up for anyone to use regardless of a key card, our AC was constantly breaking down, appliances were the cheapest they could possibly be and rarely lasted long before needing to be serviced, etc.
I really didn't want to do this.
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I called my husband and confessed to the entire thing, he said I had no choice but to get maintenance over there to get a blower and stick it under the carpet before mold started growing.
I should preface this with the fact that I am an extremely forgetful person, but this is the one time it really came back to bite me in the ass, for an entire week.
He touches the carpet and starts looking around for the source, looks at me and says “I'm thinking it's just condensation from the air vent, give it a few days with a fan and it should be fine.”
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Well, the vacuum is now smoking so, maybe the Roomba can finish the job.
But no, I got some odor absorbers, some more fans, and tried to get as much airflow going in there as possible.
I didn't know what to do. I first took every towel I could get my hands on and cleaned up the tile so it wouldn't proceed to leak into the bedroom, then I started on the closet.
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The carpet is still soaked.
So, lessons learned:
When he asks what the problem is, I just say the carpet is wet, and I have no idea how it happened.
One morning I'm getting ready to go for my run, and I decide to turn on the tub so it will be nice and cool for when I get back. I planned to turn it off before I actually left, of course, I'm not an idiot.
Finally, after a week of this madness, hubby comes home from work with something he found at the hotel he works at.
We get a bunch of moisture absorbers, every day multiple times a day I would go in with a bunch of towels and do my little stomp dance to try and get the water up.
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I insist, I say, “My husband said I should ask you to put a blower in here actually.”
I give in. I contact maintenance.
For one reason or another I completely forgot the tub was filling, I went for my run, maybe 30 minutes or so, but I took my damn time. I stopped by the community library to check out the latest dropoffs, I took a nice leisurely walk with my dog, just really took in this beautiful day because how often do you get a nice cool day in Florida? Literally never. You enjoy those nice Florida days when you get them.
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It isn't until about two days later that they send someone.
That time I accidentally flooded my bathroom and closet because I went for a run and forgot the tub was filling, but couldn't tell the maintenance worker what actually happened because he was hot.
Our second to last month living here, I had started getting really into running in the mornings. Wanted to get a jump start on the New Year, New Me business, that kind of thing.
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We pull up the carpet and stick it under there, and within a day, the closet was dry again.
Even if you have a bathtub slowly overflowing into your closet back home.
I'm a married man, but, still. It's bad enough being easily flustered at the sight of a guy with baby blue eyes, it's even worse to have then confess to that guy what a goddamned moron you are and why there's ten pounds of baking soda sprinkled all over the carpet.
I open the door, and, well…
Like, sexy hot. The kind of guy who comes to fix your “pipes” in a porno kind of hot.
So, I uh, I don't tell him what happened.
“But I really think that-"
But that wasn't the worst of it, no. Tile can be cleaned up easily, there's tile in the bathroom for a reason; because tile can get wet without any ramifications.
(I actually have a video of the moment shortly after I found the mess, if I can find it I'll post it here.)
And not just the carpet, the dresser on the floor, our suitcases, any and all clothing that was reaching the floor/on the floor, any paper on the floor, my water color pencils that had fallen earlier and were now painting the carpet in a lovely shade of tangerine and green apple. Everything was soaked, nothing was spared.
Never underestimate the patience of a good man, aka, my husband, who somehow still thinks I'm smart and worth his time after this fiasco. I've dated multiple people who left my ass over far less in the past.
I took the remaining towels, dirty laundry, every absorbent fabric I could find, threw them into the closet and did a little dancing-rolling technique to try and get as much water out of the carpet as possible.
“It's really not that wet, just put a fan on it and it will be fine.”
See the thing is this bathroom had a connecting walk-in closet.
At this point it's seriously starting to stink in there, and I'm thinking we should just call the maintenance worker back and confess, no, beg for the blower.
Keep in mind this entire time, our closet is in our bedroom and we are squished between boxes and dressers in there while the stench of fake orange peel and mildew is quickly creeping into our sleeping hours.
We paid for our idiocy, I promise you.
So the same Noah's Ark reminiscent mess that had taken over the tile in the bathroom had also managed to make it's way deep, deep into the carpet in the closet.
“No need for that,” he says, “just a fan should do it.”
First I had to take everything out of the closet, completely gutted it. Clothing was everywhere, in the bathroom, in the bedroom, etc. Everything we were storing in there had to come out, so boxes, the dresser, my organizer bins, everything was out and placed in either the bathroom or the bedroom.
But there's a little problem, he's really hot.
It did not work.
No matter how sexy the maintenance man is, tell him the truth.
The Roomba might have been responsible for that, now that I think of it actually.
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There was no tile in the closet.
The mildew smell went away, and I was able to borrow my roommates vacuum cleaner to take care of the now dry bits of baking soda, that had now been, by the way, tracked all through our bathroom and bedroom as well.
My husband is pretty peeved with me at this point, but he also comes to the resolution that this is just something we're gonna have to try and take care of ourselves. Apparently he didn't trust the guy to come back with a blower had I told him the truth, because, as a maintenance worker himself, he said “He should've realized this was a lot worse than condensation and there was something you weren't telling him.”
So, he fucking leaves. That's the extent of his input for the mysterious flood, put a fan on it.
A blower!
But I don't. I'm sweating bullets in the corner, biting my nails, cursing myself for being such a goddamned idiot, cursing myself for not being able to tell him what actually happened and how it's a lot worse than a little condensation.