This picture is for the benefit of my uncle who is a home builder. I think that if he were here, he would absolutely refuse to let me live in this building. This would be the wall between my room and my bathroom. On the other side of this wall would be the leaking water heater. Notice the rust accumulating inside the wall behind the electrical outlet and light switches. Myself and my roommates are in agreement that this just can’t be good, but we’ve had 3 different Sandbox plumbers out, they look at the water heater and the wall and say ‘maafi mushkula’ or ‘no problem’ and then they say that we just need to repaint the wall. (you can't see that the paint if bubbling off and then falling off of the wall along with small pieces of the actual wall underneath) I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m not an expert plumber, but I just don’t think that repainting the wall that has water leaking inside of it is going to fix anything.
So I try to avoid those electrical things on the wall, just for my own personal health concerns (meaning I would rather not be electrocuted) but something interesting happened last night. My roommate and I were going in to look at something in my room. I avoided the wet switches and turned on the ones that are on a different wall. As I pushed the switch things started popping and glass was breaking, the lights flashed on and off and on and off and then, the power was off. Being the experienced repairmen that we are, we turned off the light switch, flipped the breaker box, and then tried again. It did the same thing again, only this time the lights flashed brighter and the popping noises inside the walls were louder. It might not have been so traumatic had it not been for the smoke and the smell of fire that continued for a good 10 minutes afterwards. But there was nothing we could do. We would need a ladder to reach the lights on the ceiling to even see what had happened, so we just stood underneath it and watched until the smoke went away and then figured it was ok. But now I have to choose which set of light switches I want to use, the wet ones, or the ones that explode.
