Cinderella and her mushrooms

Tonight I was Cinderella before the ball. I scrubbed the bathroom - practically every inch of it - for two hours. Why, you may ask, did it take that long?

Well, once upon a time, soon after I first moved to Boston, I noticed that my bathroom was adorned with little mushrooms. Handfuls of mushrooms were sprouting out of the wall above the shower, in a totally non-Disney,  non-adorable way. I knocked them off the wall with a broom and figured that was that. Actually, I figured it was probably a problem, but my landlord - who lives many states away - already didn't seem to appreciate my asking him to fix broken window screens and find a locksmith to provide mailbox keys and/or keys to the backdoor. I learned to pick my battles. Window screens and mailbox keys were important; the back door and mushrooms were not.

Well, these pesky little guys kept growing back. And I kept knocking them down. And a crack in the ceiling and wall kept growing, and finally my roommate emailed a photo to the landlord. He replied that he didn't know what to say because our building did not have mold problems.

??

I may be only 25 and I freely admit that I am the least handy person on this planet, but I am pretty sure that mushrooms don't count as mold. And I'm pretty sure that when the plaster starts falling off your ceiling, you might want to call someone, whether or not you believe your apartment is capable of such things.

Stage 1: Peeling plaster and sprouting mushrooms.

About this time, the building management came knocking on our door. Apparently, since our tub doesn't go all the way to the wall, water from the shower was dripping along the side of the tub into the basement below us. It was leaking directly onto a support beam, so the building wanted it addressed ASAP. We thought this was a little weird since we had bought a second shower curtain expressly for the purpose of keeping water in at that uncovered end of the tub, but whatever. The building management recommended a handy man, and my roommate got permission from the landlord (oh, hello) to have him come the next day. I told her to ask the handyman about the mushrooms when he came because, assuming they were problematic, our landlord might pay more attention if we had an informed opinion.

So the handyman came and caulked our tub as had been requested. He was appropriately alarmed at the mushrooms, and one thing led to another, and suddenly he had scraped off all the plaster on that part of the wall and ceiling, cut a one-foot-square hole in the ceiling, and diagnosed the problem. We did not have a leak. Our upstairs neighbor had a leak, and it was leaking through the ceiling and our wall, into the basement. And it was creating a little mushroom garden above our shower.

A week later, a plumber came to do damage control. In the meantime, my roommate and I lived with a cardboard square nailed onto the ceiling to cover the hole. But hey, the mushrooms were totally gone so we didn't care!

Stage 2: Cardboard patch. No plaster; no mushrooms.

Fast forward until yesterday, when I found out that today was the one day that my upstairs neighbor, the plumber, and the contractor could all be available at the same time. So I took off work to be home, too, because for real let's just get this thing done. The first thing the plumber does is ask the contractor to cut a larger hole in the ceiling. After a lot of banging and clanging and sawing, I see him walk out the door with a black trash bag full of - presumably - my ceiling. And that's sort of how the rest of the day went.

Although the plumber finished his repairs, the contractor didn't do anything else. I now have a hole 2.5 feet by 3.5 feet wide in my bathroom, and I can see straight through into my neighbor's apartment (although the only thing I can see is the bottom of her tub and the inner workings of a wall). No cardboard tacked up this time. (I keep thinking how cool this would be as an opportunity for tin-can telephones.) At least I still have a functional shower--my upstairs neighbor doesn't.

Stage 3: Hello, upstairs. Goodbye, ceiling.

Anyway, the plumber's "cleaning" was pretty cursory. I mean, it was a million times better than it had been during the day, but it was not clean enough to be a usable bathroom. The toilet was gross. The tub looked like a mini-garden, it was so full of dirt. There were even splashes of something black all over the tile walls. There were chunks of plaster on the floor. There was a broken piece of wood on top of the sink--was that an important part of the framing?? So, since I will have to shower before work tomorrow and before my company's annual holiday party on Saturday, and because both Colin and my roommate will be back this weekend, I vacuumed. And scrubbed. And scrubbed. And scrubbed. I even bought a brand new toilet bowl scrubber to tackle the filth. (What did they flush down there?!)

And my bathroom is now sparkling clean, or the cleanest it's been in the year and a half since I moved in. If you ignore the plaster-less wall and the gaping hole in the ceiling, it looks pretty nice. And, happily, it is definitely mushroom-free. Now all I need is a ceiling.