For more than two years, Frank Belczyk has tried to get a water leak repaired in the ceiling of his apartment at the Spinning Plate Artist Lofts in Friendship.
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Frank Belczyk, a tenant at the Spinning Plate Artist Lofts in Friendship, complains about the water leaks in his apartment ceiling. (Lake Fong, Post-Gazette) |
In addition to complaining about it "many, many times" to the owners and the property management company that runs the building, he filed a complaint last month with the Allegheny County Health Department. He also called a lawyer.
"I'm tired of all this," Belczyk said in the first of a series of calls to the Post-Gazette. "It's been going on too long."
"They seem to have corrected the heating problem you wrote about," he said, referring to a Feb. 2 column about excessive heat in some of the 37 units in the Art Deco apartment building.
"But they can't seem to do anything about these leaks," said Belczyk, 44, a musician who plays the guitar, writes and sings songs and records original music.
Well, they hope they have.
"They" are Hill Cleary & Associates, a property management company based Downtown that handles the property for Art Space Pittsburgh Limited Partnership.
The partnership is composed of Artists and Cities of Pittsburgh, a nonprofit organization created to help artists live and work in Pittsburgh, and nonprofit organizations in Chicago and Minneapolis.
After a flurry of calls and e-mails from Belczyk and a visit to his third-floor apartment, I called Doug Valentine, vice president of property management for Hill Cleary.
Valentine prefers to use the word "challenges" instead of "problems."
So we talked about the water challenges in Belczyk's 14-foot-high ceiling.
The most serious one is in the far corner of the one-bedroom apartment. In addition to brown marks on the ceiling, it has left a brown stain about the size of a serving plate on one wall.
There's another leak around the collar of a roof drain that drops through the ceiling and elbows out the front wall that faces Baum Boulevard.
There are brown water marks around the collar.
Belczyk has stacked empty cardboard boxes under the leaks, covered them with a blue tarp and placed several white rectangular plastic containers on top of the tarp to catch the drips. The "catch" area in his living room measures about 9 feet by 6 feet.
Belczyk emphasized the ceiling and drain collar don't leak every time it rains.
"It has to be a heavy rain that lasts about three or four hours, one of those cats-and-dogs-type storms, or a heavy wet snow," he said. "But, once it starts to drip, it seems to go on forever. And the drips really echo in this apartment."
"I'm familiar with [Belczyk's] situation," Valentine said last week. "We thought we had it solved last summer because we hadn't heard from him. But, here we are with another leak or the re-opening of an old one. We have signed a contract to have it taken care of as soon as the contractor can get out there."
The contractor, Tri-State Waterproofing & Pointing, arrived two days ago and finished the job yesterday.
"It wasn't the roof," Valentine said. "The owners put a new roof on when they renovated the building several years ago."
So what was it?
"The parapet," Valentine said, referring to a chest-high wall of brick that runs along the edge of the flat roof.
He said the top of the parapet and the side that faces Baum Boulevard had to be sealed and waterproofed. It seems to me it's the kind of work that should have been done when the new roof was installed.
"We went well beyond the work we did last year," Valentine said. "It was a much more involved repair. We also sealed the roof drain above his apartment. I also had them check on some other areas while they were up there."
There are leaks in two other apartments, but their occupants declined to comment.
When I asked Valentine if Belczyk was a chronic complainer, he paused for a moment and then said:
"He's a very persistent guy.
"But I wouldn't want any water leaking into my apartment, either."
Post Your Problems appears Tuesday through Friday, addressing questions and problems from readers. Yvonne Zanos
from KDKA-TV looks into consumer-related issues, including difficulties with products and services.
Post-Gazette Staff Writer Lawrence Walsh helps sort through bureaucratic problems.
Lawrence Walsh can be reached at 412-263-1895. His e-mail address is lwalsh@post-gazette.com.
