As Luck Would Have It

New Year’s resolutions come eight months late in my Lower Manhattan co-op. At our annual meeting every summer, our community pledges to do better — just as we promise ourselves as individuals in January — to make healthier choices (reducing our building’s carbon emissions) and pay more attention to our appearance (tackling facade repairs). 

Adhering to Louis Pasteur’s advice that luck favors the prepared, our board also uses the opportunity to avert foreseeable problems by changing the house rules and bylaws. That’s how we agreed to charge shareholders a fee when doing renovations, which will pay for inevitable damage to our entrance door hinges and lobby wall panels. Similarly, the board put an end to sneaky, already-prohibited short-term rentals by requiring the registration of “guests” who wheel in suitcases soon after shareholders wheel out theirs. And to rein in people who confuse our low-service co-op with a luxury hotel, we now have a house rule that bans asking the super to run personal errands.

Under consideration for the upcoming meeting is a new renovation rule to prohibit “wet over dry.” Unlike the watercolor technique of the same name that generates unpredictable results when dry paint is applied to wet paper, our board is seeking to avert the predictable noise and odors, vibrations and leaks that are quite likely to occur when new bathrooms, kitchens and laundry rooms are installed over other shareholders’ living rooms and bedrooms.

As a dabbler at the easel, I know the practice works with watercolor. As a co-op shareholder, I’m not so sure. But I understand why the board wants to give it a try.

A few years ago, a shareholder wanted to relocate her kitchen directly over the bedroom and living room of the downstairs apartment, which at the time was unoccupied and on the market. Plans were reviewed and approved by the board, the co-op’s architect and the Department of Buildings. Work was underway when the lower apartment was purchased. The new shareholder was aware that construction was happening above but never asked which rooms were going where. 

I understand this. Years earlier, when I moved into the building, it also wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask which rooms were under or over mine. My only concern was getting approval from the bank and the board. Still, I lucked out with the best-case scenario: an apartment where wet is over wet and dry is over dry both above and below. But that didn’t prevent me from being both the recipient and the donor of noise and odors, vibrations and leaks. For a few years that felt like forever, one of the apartments on the floor below mine was owned by a pair of architects. Despite their professional experience with issues that can arise in communal living, the pair had zero tolerance for the noise made by my vacuum cleaner. A leak in their kitchen brought on a barrage of complaints long after my kitchen had been ruled out as the cause. Visits from my plumber resulted in screaming phone calls and banging on my door. Meanwhile, on my side of their ceiling, I smelled their cigarette smoke and heard them argue, which I could only hope was about moving out – which they eventually did. 

Fortunately, the other problems that have occurred in apartments directly above and below mine have been solved by something more useful than new rules. I have good neighbors.

When the wine fridge in the apartment upstairs sent vibrations through my kitchen ceiling (wet over wet), my neighbor had it fixed immediately. After a radiator in the living room upstairs oozed brown goo down my living room wall (dry over dry), that neighbor called a plumber to replace the radiator valves and a painter to cover the water stains well before the issue hit the board’s agenda. By the time my bathtub drained into the apartment of one of my downstairs neighbors (wet bathroom over wet kitchen), I had a painter and a plumber on speed dial to send right down.

As the board prepares for our annual meeting, perhaps members can take solace knowing that in trying to prevent future problems, they are trying to outfox the second law of thermodynamics – the tendency of all systems to move from order to disorder. Banning wet over dry won’t guarantee any apartment is free from the intrusions of another. Pipes will still burst, aromas will escape and sound will travel, be it music or quarrels, children or dogs. Or vacuum cleaners.

Regardless of the rules and despite the board’s best efforts, whatever can go wrong will go wrong. When it comes to enacting laws, the only completely reliable one is Murphy’s.