My wife and I are unfortunate in that the people living in the apartment above ours are immature, irresponsible, noisy, and stupid. (I’ll spare everyone off-topic examples and get to the point.)
There is some sort of water leak upstairs, apparently in more than one place. This is a problem in several senses:
[ul][li]mold is growing in spots on our kitchen ceiling, disfiguring our apartment and doing God knows what to the strength of the concrete;[/li]
[li]problem 1 results in bits of paint and mold falling off onto utensils, etc.;[/li]
[li]the cement blocks, etc, above the false ceiling in the bathrooms are covered with white mold;[/li]
[li]I suspect there’s also mold on our bedroom wall near the ceiling, but we can’t see it because there’s a false ceiling in there with no opening;[/li]
[li]My wife and I can hear the maddening drop, drop, drop of water late at night when we need to sleep;[/li]
[li]I can’t help but think “Amoy Gardens.”[/li][/ul]
I can’t see the leaking spots, but it’s obvious they exist.
The people upstairs have been unwilling to do anything about the situation, despite repeated and increasingly irate entreaties. They also avoid communcation with us and the rest of the people in the building. They don’t usually answer their door buzzer or even telephone. (Perhaps they know it’s us.) They have been uncommunicative about what might be causing the problem and deny that they or their apartment could have anything to do with it. They don’t want to let plumbers examine their apartment. And they claim to have no money to do anything.
We own our apartment, so just moving isn’t really that much of an option. The people upstairs own their apartment, so complaining to their landlord isn’t an option.
As much as baseball bats and gangsters might fit into my revenge fantasies, I want to keep things legal.
They are loud people who tend to stay up much later than we do, so they could easily respond to anything we do by dropping things on their floor above us even more than they already do. But this water damage (and noise!) is not something that can be allowed to continue forever.
Since they live on the top floor, revenge possibilities for me could include basketball practice above them during their sleep hours; but they could easily respond in kind. They also have an illegal structure on the roof (empty and uninhabited); it was built to help prevent their roof from leaking. They certainly wouldn’t like it if that were to be torn down by the authorities.
I want to avoid an all-out war with those jerks. It does, however, seem time to at least bring in the law. But which office that I could complain to might give me the best chance of results? (The building is in Taipei County.) Or might something else work better?
Help!
