#3 - I'm Being Punked, right??

#3 - Days 3-5 in the Apartment (I know, I'm dragging this out!):

After a day without hot water, the dedicated maintenance man comes, flips some switch, and it's ok. And we have most of the next day with no new issues. But as I should expect, that was too good to be true. The electricity all of a sudden shuts off. The entire electrical panel got tripped and continues to do so each time we attempt to turn it back on. So, again we put a call into the apartment maintenance man, but this time he is not to be reached. I mean no ring or voice mail on the other end at all!

This isn't good. So we call the relocation company and ask them to try. They try all day with no luck. So finally (after wasting a day with unanswered calls) they decide around 4pm that they will find another electrician to send over - the next day. He arrives, flips the switch, and everything works! I ask him to look into it further, so he goes around and turns on and off each switch in the apartment, and it stays on. A 5 minute visit and he's gone. 

Well, 30 minutes later it happens again. But he can't come back for another 4 hours, after which time when we both arrive to look into the situation, it immediately turns on again. This time he agrees to stay for a while and research the situation, since two is a charm I guess. So for about 15 minutes he again switches on and off each light switch (we have so so many, so that that naturally does take time), each air conditioner, anything and everything... and is just about to give up when it happens again. Thank god, I think. Now he can find the source of the problem and fix it.

Wishful thinking... he finds the source of the issue (guess what, it's the hot water heater!!), so electricity on, but once again, no hot water. Now we have to wait for a specialist.

Water leak, hot water, electricity... all that's left is the gas. Well, so far so good, so keep your fingers crossed.
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The "specialist" turns out to be the same guy who turned his phone off, and what he learned was that the water in the vacant apartment next door is also being heated by our hot water heater (both units owned by the same absent landlady)... I'm thinking, if someone moves in, then we are paying the electrical bill for heating their water, right? No, he says, but honestly, I don't see how that's possible. 

Anyway, he fixed the pipe that was somehow tripping the electricity, but something he did next door opened the pipe for one of our radiators to heat the room on high. So, if we don't have the air conditioning on, we roast. Of course we only figured this out a few days later, but now he doesn't have access to the apartment next door.

Honestly, the list of issues just keeps growing and each time someone comes to fix one thing, it takes several hours and then they are gone for a few days - during which time two more issues have presented themselves.

Oh, I don't know if I mentioned this, but as the list of issues is growing, and we go from bathtub flooding to no hot water, the relocation company is calling the landlady in Monaco. They are continually leaving messages, saying that she needs to pay for these repairs, etc, and finally she answers one call and says, "stop calling me about these issues." Since then I have learned that this apartment sat essentially vacant for about two years since the remodel, so in a way we are the test case.

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In the mean time, thought you'd like to see the "palace-style" apartment with all of it's crystal chandeliers, traditional moldings, and the largest darn mirror behind our bed... I mean, why??? 

Oh, and it has temporary Ikea furniture. Our container, which was supposed to take 8-10 weeks, only just "got on the water", so we will receive it, well, maybe next year if we are lucky!!??? ;)