Piso Problems

I'm told that not all apartments are as problematic as ours.  For the sake of everyone who lives in this country, I hope not.  Hardly a day has passed that we haven't had a technician of some kind or other in our piso, poking around in the apartment's guts.  Usually he's in the kitchen, but sometimes he'll switch it up and go to the bathroom or the living room or the laundry room.  Since I've lived here, we've had problems with, in chronological order, the oven, the shower, the hot water heater, the phone line (which we need to get internet), the phone line again, the other shower, the hot water heater again, the plumbing in general, and the washing machine.  The other shower and phone line have yet to be fixed and the second hot water heater problem left us bereft of hot water for almost a week.  That's not even to mention the various small annoyances, i.e. the sliders have no curtains on them, the door doesn't shut well, the shades on my bedroom window are really finicky, the tables are all unbalanced... I could go on.

I won't lie; I'm used to a pretty comfortable lifestyle.  I like things to be comfortable.  But I can deal with less comfort. What I have the hardest time dealing with is when pivotal things that should always work--hot water, washing machine--don't.  Partially it's my fault; I neglected to ask enough questions when we were moving in and made assumptions that I should have just asked about, particularly in regards to the phone line.  But I did not anticipate that hot water itself would be a problem; perhaps the price, but not the availability.  By the same token, I saw that there was a phone line when we first examined the apartment; what I (and my landlord) didn't expect was that it was cut right outside the door (for what reason I cannot imagine).

Fortunately--extremely fortunately--we have a good landlord who lives close by, so he, and Pedro, have been able to help out a lot fixing all the problems.  Should it have been taken care of before he rented it to us?  Of course.  But I don't think he's trying to screw us.  Our apartment belonged to our landlord's mother until she died (creepy, I know) and it's been un-lived-in for two years, which is part of the problem; nothing had been checked for a long time before we moved in.  

Thank goodness for Javier (our landlord) and Pedro.  I think I probably could deal with the problems by myself, but it would be a huge hassle and much more diffficult and frankly, when it comes to those things, I'm way more interested in fixing the problem than practicing my Spanish.  There's time for that after I shower and put on clean clothes.