Tag: plants

Or, rather, the jungle escaped.

Management finally got around to painting the new balcony this week. As you may recall, we had to clear everything off two days before Halloween, filling a corner of our living room with plants, gardening supplies, and patio furniture for what was supposed to be a three-day construction project. They tore everything out that Monday or Tuesday, and had the new balcony up by Wednesday…but then they didn’t paint it until two weeks later. (The leasing office told me that the paint was being shipped from Texas, so they had to wait for the paint to show up.)

It’s nice to have the space back. And it’s nice that we’ll be able to water all the plants without balancing acts worthy of tightrope walkers, or stretches worthy of Plastic Man. And the new balcony does seem to be better constructed than the last one.

When we moved in, we had a rickety, termite-infested balcony. The apartment complex changed hands, and one of the many things the new owners did was to replace the balconies. Of course, they told us to clear everything off in November, then changed their minds and decided to wait until January to do anything. And when they did put them up, they didn’t bother with things like properly-treated wood for outdoor use, and sap oozed out of the floorboards for months. Then the complex changed hands again. And the new new owners decided the balconies needed to be replaced again. They seem to have used the right materials for the structural elements. The floors feel more solid, and the boards are placed more closely together. But we think they reused some of the boards on the non-structural parts. We saw sap oozing from one of the railings as we placed our bench against one side.

The more things change…

A good chunk of this weekend was taken up moving stuff around the apartment. Management has been rebuilding all the balconies. (This is probably a good thing, since the previous owners didn’t bother to use treated wood, and sap leaked out from the floorboards for several months.) On Thursday, we got the notice that they would start on our group on Monday. This means that we have to move everything off of the balcony.

Our next-door neighbors lucked out, since they just moved out on Friday. Though I suppose that meant they had to clear off the balcony anyway.

So Saturday afternoon was spent clearing space out of the storage section of the dining area so that we could move stuff out of the the living room so that we could make room for all the plants and the patio furniture. Then Sunday morning was spent hauling stuff inside. By the time we were done, a corner of our living room had been transformed into an indoor jungle:

With any luck, they’ll be faster about it than the previous management was. The previous management warned us to clear everything off overnight, then changed their minds, and didn’t actually start work until two months later. Not that they told us they had postponed it indefinitely, so we went quite a while wondering when they would start, and assuming we couldn’t put things back, until we finally asked. Fortunately we had less stuff on the balcony back then.