Because the fucker below me has chosen tonight to do something in his* apartment. I don’t know if he’s cleaning carpets or something else, but the fumes are rising straight into my apartment. And in the last 30 minutes he’s started using some sort of machine that sounds like a vacuum type thing
I went outside to see if I could see into his window and figure out what it is that’s going on, and all his windows are open, so it’s obviously something he didn’t want to breathe. But of course I want to. After all, why else would I be at home on a Friday night? No chance of doing this on a Saturday during the day when it’s less likely that the people above you will be home? Oh, but tomorrow’s going to be a nice day with temperatures in the 50s and sunshine. So you want to make sure you have the day free to go do whatever you want to do.
I wouldn’t mind crawling into bed early, but with these damn fumes, I don’t particularly want to. Not knowing what they are, I wouldn’t want to not wake up. That sure would suck, what with my life going so well right now.
Oh, the machine’s stopped. Maybe he’s finished for the evening and I can eventually close these windows and turn off all the fans. If the fumes don’t die down in 30 minutes, I’m going downstairs to remind them that fumes rise.
*I don’t know if it’s a man or a woman below me. I just used he because, it’s what I used.
I had this happen to me the week after I’d given birth. It was the first week of August in South Carolina…hot. I had the air conditioning on and my landlord decided to do some sort of work on the apartment below me that caused horrible, noxious fumes to seep into my apartment. I didn’t want my baby to breathe it in and it was really too hot to open the windows. I did end up opening the windows and then taking the baby in the car to drive around for a few hours while it aired out a bit. Before I did that, I went downstairs to explain the situation to him, hoping he’d stop. He didn’t really seem to give a shit.
You should go down there and tell him you’ll send him the bill for the hotel room you have to get tonight. Yeah, right, I wouldn’t be that ballsy either.
What drives me bananas is people’s apartments where the landlord controls the temperature, which is of course set to “Dantesque” throughout the late autumn, winter, and early Spring.
So you have people with no recourse but to have their windows open throughout a Montreal January.
Not the most efficient use to which we could be putting our natural resources, yes?
I dunno, the low here yesterday was 45. The highs have been in the 60’s and 70’s most of January. And the highs in summer never crack 100! My windows are open all year round!
Well, when I first started smelling it, I thought it was nail polish remover or paint thinner. As it got stronger, and he started up the machine thing, I decided that it was probably carpet cleaning solution, but I’m not sure.
Once he turned off the machine, the smell went away pretty quickly though.
matt_mcl, sometimes the landlord doesn’t have a choice about where they set the heat for their building. Depending on the type of heat being used, what makes for livable temperatures at the far end of the heating system leaves other tenants opening windows. My apartment building uses a low pressure steam system, with a single common supply and return line. Which runs through my apartment. I’ve disabled the radiators, and still have an apartment that’s too bloody hot.
