Adventures in Slum Living -Episode 6: The Strange, Defective Middle Wall at 16 Benson Street, Albany NY

Apartment Repair Fails: or My Idiot Landlord

Adventures in Slum Living

Turning the 

Episode Number Six: The Strange, defective, Middle Wall at 16 Benson Street

Curiously from the outside the apartment doesn't look that bad. And the general neighborhood is not that bad either although Benson Street is not the nicest street in Albany. As a relative remarked, "why is it that all of the streets around you look better than yours?" And apartments in Albany are usually not bad size. 

However, this apartment is actually cut in half down the middle with a strange, dividing door and wall built in the middle. Of course, like everything else in the building it's defective and badly installed.

Here's the before picture of what the door locking mechanism looked like. I'd started to do some repairs at this point, you can see some spackling compound, but I really had not done much.

Here's the after picture. I'd done a lot of repairs and filled in the strange, gaping, ugly hole in the door, but I had not sanded the filler and made it look nice and finished the painting. I also had not cleaned up the hardware, nor started on the strange chip over the bolt. (which will be shown later.) 

You will note that there are two bolt locks and one sliding blot that are attached to the door designed to keep it locked and prevent people from entering one half of the floor from the other half. 

As mentioned, there was one day when the girlfriend thought someone was trying to enter through this door and called the landlord. (It does sound that way when the people on the other side use one of their closets. We can also hear them having sex, which is quite noisy and would be comical, except it's not, As well as when they argue, which is pretty much the same way. At some point I'm going to have to write a separate post on them.) 

As mentioned the landlord's response was to send me an e-mail saying he could not understand her because she had an accent. Therefore he ignored it. The landlord, Wayne B. Whitney, is a moron and a fucking, childish asshole. (He will, in time, get his own post.) 

So inspected the door carefully, discovered that one of the bolts was not aligned properly and would not lock or shut. I called the landlord and told him that it was not properly installed. 

"Yes, it is," he said. 

"No, it's not," I said. 

"Yes, it is," he said. 

"No, it's not. You can come and check yourself," I said. 

"I bought it that way." said Wayne B. Whitney in one of the most childish statements I've heard in years. 

So here we have shots of the poorly installed bolts.
 

This is the top bolt. 

This is the second, lower bolt.

 

You will notice that the ruler goes in much deeper on the upper bolt than on the lower bolt. This is because the upper bolt fixture is misaligned and will not lock properly.

As described above, the issue was mentioned to the landlord and you saw his response.






As mentioned the wood frame on the lower bolt was damaged. I did have some thoughts on how to fix that, but, well, why bother?





Here's a close up of the chipped wooden door frame and the lower bolt, the only one that works, by the way.

This is a shot of the lower sliding bolt, notice the same shitty Wayne B. Whitney paint job.

And, finally, some poor quality door knob painting.