Kelly and I have lived in our condo for a little over three years now. Things around here have started to break at a consistent pace, likely accelerated by the fact that we are home all the time now during lockdown.
Our laundry has been coming out a little funky. This is not due to lockdown but the fact that Henry (nearing one year old) is getting his clothes covered in food. This forced us to discover some elements of the washer and dryer that are supposed to cleaned out regularly (not sure we’ve done that since we moved in).
Our toilet paper holders have become loose / fallen off. They have an element that needs to be tightened with an odd looking screw head. I purchased a computer repair kit (for another step in this process) which included the required screw head. With that tool, this was an easy fix.
We have two toilets that use Koehler flushless technology. It’s an incredibly stupid device that we hate. They have all kinds of issues: sometimes they run endlessly, sometimes they don’t run at all, and they use up batteries endlessly (I eventually bought rechargeable batteries). I looked into switching to standard flush tech, but that would run us around $150. Not awful, but I’m not sure how long we will live here. I spoke with Koehler and explained that our units have just stopped flushing even after replacing the batteries. The flush units we have have been discontinued but they were kind enough to send us 2 of the new units that have replaced ours. So far they are working alright.
My laptop (a 3 year old Dell) has been running a little slow and Kelly’s (a 6 year old MacBook Pro) has been running very slow. I installed new RAM (Kelly went from 4 GB to 16, I went from 8 GB to 16) and new solid-state hard drives. For Kelly I simply cloned her existing hard drive. For me, I started from scratch installing both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 in a dual-boot setup. Then I copied over the files I needed from my old hard drive. I would rate these upgrades a strong success. The computers are booting up and running very fast and I love Ubuntu for programming. I was very pleased with how easy it was to copy over my iTunes library including metadata like play counts. When I was pulling my old hard drive out of my computer, the SATA cable came out from my computer. I was petrified. It turned out there was a latch I have pulled out and once I tucked the cable under it (and aligning it up with some tiny pins) and put the latch down, everything was fine.
Our dishwasher is leaking. I did some research and it looks like there are a number of possible causes. It isn’t clear to me how to diagnose the exact cause and most of the fixes look above my pay grade. I think we will be calling a plumber for that one.
In our bedroom, we have noticed some serious paint blemishes. About 18 months ago our condo was the victim of serious damage due to a nearby construction project. Our unit was fixed up & painted including this wall. Based on my research of paint blemishes, it seems the two most likely causes are underlying moisture or improper painting (I.e. painting on a wet surface). I’m working with our property manager to see if we can diagnose the exact issue. If this is the result of poor work by the repair crew, I’d like to get them involved in repairing the poor repair.