About a year ago, I discovered I was allergic to my apartment floor. The theory was that one of the previous residents had had a cat. The reaction was much like what I get when I’m in a room that houses a cat: wheezy inhale/exhale, watery, irrritated eyes and given enough time, runny nose and sneezing. After explaining the situation to my landlord, she agreed to replace my carpet, given I’d be renewing my lease and accepting the concomitant 5% rent increase.
Wednesday and Thursday night I moved all my belongings — save my sofa and mattress — off the carpet. Cam and Melissa loaned me their tarp, which helped out; thanks guys. I ended up purchasing a tarp of my own, just to be on the safe side; I have a lot of stuff.
Not certain that some possessions could take the high Florida humidity, they ended up in the kitchen:
Unfortunately I didn’t get a shot of my loaded porch. The carpet replacement company showed up at 8:30 Friday morning. I took off to work to get some stuff I needed to renew my driver’s license, renewed it, and by the time I made it back to my apartment to retrieve my camera at 10:30 — I had the day off and decided I wanted to take a few photos downtown — it looked like they were just finishing up! Pretty quick!
Unfortunately a few hours after they left I discovered the nails on the “tackless strips” — standard equipment for retaining tension on carpets near the wall — poked out of the carpet about 7mm, and I almost cut my foot stepping on them accidentally… several times. I left the leasing office a message about it that afternoon, but it’s been a couple days now and I haven’t heard anything.
Am I being too picky? Should I just take out the hammer now? It doesn’t strike me as right to put up with workmanship that can cause bodily injury. On the other hand, they’re just tiny nails.
New carpet
Comments
3 responses to “New carpet”
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There’s no reason why the tackless strips should be sticking out like that. I don’t know if there’s different heights to the strips, but they should *not* be sticking out like that – I mean, who knows who is going to be living there after you? Small kids? Why should you have to put up with a potentially very dangerous floor?
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Yeah… well, there’s no way I’m going to leave them like that. It’s just a question of whether I should badger the leasing office about it. I discussed yesterday with my colleagues and it was a toss up. Do it yourself, cave to crummy workmanship. Make them do it, get yourself on the bad-apple list. Move out, they’ll fill my apartment immediately and can charge more for it.
I called the leasing office again this morning and got the machine. No thanks, I want to talk to a person this time. -
If you get shortness of breathing when you are having allergic reaction, you might have asthma … … Go get it check out.
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