telepathic cat seeking revenge for recently changing brands of cat food
other (add your explanation below)
0voters
The Scenario:
I was sitting at my desk typing up a vocabulary list for my class when I hear a crunchy popping sound, not too much unlike a stomach-turning bone fracture, from the wall and my floor in the middle of the south-facing wall of my bedroom. I thought it was my cat playing with something, but my cat was up on my bed with a bottle bristle tail and big, panicky eyes. It couldn’t be something falling on my floor because my room is carpeted. After shouting out a question full of obscenities, I went out into the living room on the other side of my wall to see if it was coming from there. It wasn’t. I came back in, and watched the area where the sound was coming from, unplugged my broken heater which was in the outlet on that wall, thinking it might be the outlet about to cause a fire, and it still continued. I stood back near the door (in case I needed to escape) and watched until suddenly the carpet right along the wall popped up a little and fell about an inch.
:shock:
When I stopped freaking out, I walked over and noticed there was a hump in my floor…I lifted up the carpet tiles in the middle of my room where I felt it was safe enough to examine, and none of the floor tiles under the part of the hump were broken, but now my room has a very solid ridge. And I honestly believe my room goes into a slope on either side of it. I am chalking it up to a burst pipe under my floor (which might be explained by this cold weather), a quick and rapid earthquake that I didn’t feel, something to do with all of the construction that has recently taken place in my neighborhood, a very powerful family of vermin, or some evil portal being opened in my bedroom floor despite the fact that I live on the fifth floor of my building. In any case, this was just the catalyst I needed in searching for a new place to live.
Has anyone ever heard of such a thing happening here? And if so, what in the #$%
something to do with all of the construction that has recently taken place in my neighborhood
maybe there are other explanations but this is the only one you mentioned that has a plausible ring to it. well except maybe for the evil portal. perhaps the cold snap was a bit too much for the concrete in your building and a weaker spot where pipes run through gave way. I kind of remember this happening in a place I lived once.
I will ask my neighbors downstairs if they’ve heard any funny noises. There doesn’t seem to be anything going on in the living room floor, but I am definitely sleeping on my sofa on the side of the room that seems more attached to the building than my bed’s side. If it’s benign, is there a way to get it fixed? If it’s not, what should I do?
By the way, that hump just rose another inch or two a few minutes ago…I expect my bedroom to be out on the street by sunrise at this rate. Maybe it’s time to move everything to the other side of the room. Especially since I think that slope of mine is in fact, one-sided, not a hump, and is pointing at a downward angle toward my street.
More and more like a letter ‘L’ lying on its side…
[quote=“ImaniOU”]By the way, that hump just rose another inch or two a few minutes ago…I expect my bedroom to be out on the street by sunrise at this rate. Maybe it’s time to move everything to the other side of the room. Especially since I think that slope of mine is in fact, one-sided, not a hump, and is pointing at a downward angle toward my street.
More and more like a letter ‘L’ lying on its side…[/quote]
I think you need to alert your neighbors to this and seek their assistance immediately.
make sure you keep the computer on the good side so you can keep us posted
an actual slope? you better keep your person on that side for that matter.
try calling the taipei city “jianguanchu” in the morning, they handle building inspections, don’t know if they’d do anything but i’m gaining greater faith in taiwan’s beauracracy these days
Sorry to be the alarmist, but after pulling up more carpeting, I see that it is merely a hump. The corner where I first heard the sounds has broken tile. I think I could loosen it up to see what is under it, but I am afraid of cutting myself and of makign things worse. There seems to be no damage to the area outside of my room, but it is running from one wall to the other. It doesn’t seem like anyone else in the building has it either. I will see if I can have someone come and look at it. I am thinking of pulling all of the carpeting up from the middle of my room in preparation of an inspection which I will ask the Mandarin-speaking staff at my school for help. Thank you everyone for your helpful suggestions.
The funny thing is that, despite all of this happening, I am still determined to finish typing up my prep work…
I will take the suggestion of moving my laptop to the more attached side of my room and keeping y’all posted. I hope the fact that my room is on the corner of the building isn’t going to cause problems…of course, I’d be even more worried if it were in the middle of the building. Of course, the door out of my apartment, the elevator, and the stairs are all on the side of the hump that faces the street…worse case scenario, I’ve got that plastic stuff that you tie boxes with…I guess I can rappel downstairs to work in the morning. It’ll make my morning commute that much more interesting.
Happened to us at our last apt with tile floor. After living there about a year, we found the tiles cracked in just one spot and thought maybe our kid had hit it with a golf club or something. The area around it started breaking up too and we could jiggle some of the tiles. We never did call anyone and figured that the floor might not have been level before they put the tiles down. Around the cracked portion, there were some tiles that didn’t break but just kind of popped up off the floor, still stuck together.
You should probably alert your landlord and prepare to find a new apartment. The building you are in may be weak or old and if there is an earthquake you may find the situation much worse. If it is just cracked tile but no changes in the structure then you’re fine.
Maybe you have noticed if if you drop coins on the floor some places are hollow, that’s right completely hollow, and it could be that one of these places got too cold or too hot and just broke. I don’t recommend dropping coins on the floor unless you risk pissing off your downstairs neighbors. I used to live on the second floor of a building, no one lived on 1st floor and I found out several places like this.
This happened in my old apartment. I came home one night and stepped into the kitchen (in the dark) and heard an almighty cracking sound. Thinking I was about to fall through the floor I jumped about ten feet and slowly inched around 'till I found the light. There was a mini volcano of tiles that I had just half stepped on…truly one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in my life :shock:
I didn’t know what the hell it was, for a week me and my roommates gingerly stepped around it anytime we went to the kitchen!!
It seems that the bonding underneath the tiles often slips (maybe flooding related or from the contraction or expansion of old concrete). I believe it’s related to the cold snap we have and the cold caused the walls or the concrete to contract but the tiles have a different ‘heat’ index or whatever because it happened during the first real cold snap of last year.
. Anyway the best thing to do is take the carpet up and take a hammer to the hump if it consists of tiles(tell your landlord to get over and fix it too).
If its not made of tiles I’d be worried. My landlord told me this was common in the old apartments.
My old flat had a poodle of water in the middle of the kitchen. We mopped the floor several times a day (or was it a month?) and after a hour or so, the lake would be back. Odd. I moved, but for other reasons.
It sounds like structural concrete damage due to poor construction. Most likely directly related to the very cold weather. Concrete expands and contracts significantly with heat and cold and will do exactly what you described without adequate steel reinforcement bars and thermal expansion/contraction joints – not to mention the well-known practice in the Taiwan construction industry of throwing empty oil cans into poured concrete to fill up space and keep down cost.
Assuming it’s structural damage to your building, while it’s unlikely your building will collapse, the next time the weather warms significantly, the building’s concrete structure will start to expand and, with less structural integrity then, could fail structurally even more.
I’d go downstairs to your neighbor’s apartment and see how serious the damage is there. I’d ask cleaners or security or anyone who knows the building well if they’ve seen other damage. If you find more widespread damage, I’d move out as soon as possible, particurlarly before another big weather change. If yours is the only space that has damage, I’d move out at a more leisurely pace but I’d move out nonetheless rather than risk riding out an earthquake in such a building.
think this one’s an urban legend. some which were used purely for decorative walling support pop up in earthquake damage, leading to the story.[/quote]
I guarantee you it’s not an urban legend. Ask any Taiwanese building contractor active in the building construction business in south or central Taiwan over the last few decades, preferably after a few beers when their guard is down. They were used in support columns, balcony floors, living space floors, retaining (‘decorative’) walls – anywhere the contractor unilaterally deemed that the code requirements were ‘excessive.’
