The Seattle area got blitzed by a wind and rain storm this past weekend, and it caught a lot of people off-guard.  I know… Seattle, synonymous with rain, was surprised by the high winds (+60mph gusts) and much-needed rain after an unseasonably haaaawwwt Summer.  Lotta days over 90 degrees F, we’re just not used to it here in the NorthWest.  We want 68F-75F, light breeze, and a few clouds.  Not a lot of us getting Vitamin D, which probably rolls into our penchant for reading, binge-watching TV shows, and Lumbersexual Culture.

Don’t I look rugged holding this rugged outdoor thing? I think it’s a tent or something.

In the meantime, a condo I own was in the middle of a re-roof when the company’s project manager was visited by a structural engineer and reminded that, hey, you didn’t pull a permit for this addition!  Ha, silly little oversight by the Project Manager, I’m sure they are a professional who never slips up but it was a bad day at the track and he was probably an idiot anyway and this was part of a long line of missteps.

And in needing said permit, PM called his crew off the job with work only half-done.  And then A Circus of Dipshittery followed, leading to a number of condos getting water damage.  Because they didn’t finish the job. Nor check-back on it. Nor do anything to keep it from getting properly sealed.  Too busy to come by and do the work.  Kinda like your neighbor borrowing your lawn mower and then acting like you gave it to them, but with sober adults.

So I wrote this letter to the property management company to make sure we all got  level-set and were in-step as we moved ahead, to assure a cool-headed approach to remediating the damage caused by a tiny oversight.  Golly, gang, let’s do it right!

Let me know in the comments f I hit the right tone.

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From: gblott@
To: dave.k; jasonm; taylor
CC: thomas & peggy
Subject: Bad roofing vs. Rain & Weather at Cambridge Place
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2015 11:11:16 -0700

Hello Taylor, Dave, and Jason;

 I can’t really do any “business speak,” so please accept the candor in this communication as my utmost honesty.

My condo was one of too many that sustained water damage from this weekend’s rain.  The damage was the result of short-sighted and poorly managed work done by the roofing company that cut & run a couple weeks ago.

Sunday morning I was brought up to speed on why the roofers left over 10 days ago, but I don’t care.  The “why” is NMFP, or Not My F’ing Problem.

Somebody needs to be fired, and I hope more than a couple of people feel embarrassed by the “effort” on the roofing. I am not directing this blame at Rise, but since I don’t have the address of the guy running the show for the roofing company, feel free to help build our case to boot the roofers and make sure shit gets done properly.

Somebody got paid to not do this, then to not do it again.

I suggest, seriously, sending these pictures to the owner of ROOFING and asking them if they’re happy with the result, and if they’d like us to post these pictures on Yelp and Facebook.  Happy to do so. 

The amount of money wasted on such a small area of work, which is probably 1/50^th the amount of money that will likely be spent if this gets to legal finger pointing, was minuscule.  Maybe $10 of roofing paper?

 Look at the pictures I have sent along, the first one being the corner of the roof above my unit’s master bedroom BEFORE MaintCo and the roofers were called on Sunday, 8/30.

The second picture is AFTER “work” was done on the corner by somebody from the roofing company.  No, seriously.  Somebody was paid to come out and do that, and they shouldn’t have been, and better not charge a penny for it unless they want to get kicked in the crotch.  I can’t imagine this shit was checked by anybody at ROOFING before they walked off the job. This is a huge “eh, screw these guys” as their own poor planning kicked them off the clock.  Not our fault, but we get to pay for it. Get pissed off, you deserve it. 

 Then please discuss amongst yourselves – PROP MGMT & ROOFING, who should take the blame, be fired, and pay for the remediation of the water damage to the units. I am working with MaintCo on that.  The MaintCo team was very helpful but shouldn’t do anything before the roof is fixed.  I also suggest calling R Freeman Roofing at (425) 825-7220.  The owner, Roy, is a 2^nd Generation owner there and is local to Kirkland.

It seems like a severe lack of foresight to see the work as-is, and untouched for 2 weeks, and feel safe in assuming it would be fine in our area.  Obviously they don’t care about the work they do, or else somebody would have come by last week to check on corners like this. .

Here are the issues all the way around…

–        My friend and tenant alerted me on Saturday night of the leak, in the middle of the storm.  That’s a shitty thing to have to deal with on a Saturday night, or any night, but that’s how she got to wind down the evening, with water dripping into the master bedroom closet all over her clothing.

–        Whomever has damage now gets to deal with the shifting of their schedules to accommodate remediation. 

–        It’s a shitty thing to have to burn an entire Sunday morning on, when I could have been spending time with my family. 

–        The problem was so avoidable, and the solution is so simple that any of us with a ladder and a roll of roofing paper and a staple gun could have handled it: Cover the edge with paper, staple it, get off the ladder, have a beer.

–        It’s more of our time talking to an insurance company about the aftermath of some dipshit’s inability to properly finish their job, instead of spending my time getting work done to earn money to pay for projects like this.  Or maybe we don’t have to make a claim and MaintCo can handle this remediation, and we bill ROOFING for it and still throw down a painful Yelp review.  I’m at the point where I’ll fight them in the parking lot, but they’d forget where their corner is and leave early. 

–         Pardon the language, or don’t, but what the actual fuck? What else would you rather do with your time and energy today? This week?  We shouldn’t have to babysit this stuff.  And this may be a small issue in the bigger world of property management, but again, Life is Time, and the roofing company screwed themselves, and in turn, screwed us.

I can’t think of any other way to say it, gang.  Lazy and inexcusable work, low-level professionalism, poor/no communication.

As of this morning there was still no remediation on the roof.  Dan from MaintCo and I talked on the phone and he said he’s going over there to repaper it.  I hope he does.
Again, please forward these pictures to the owner of ROOFING.

Thanks all, have a good Monday,
Geoff Lott