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by AutoModerator
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Home repair question; looking for some advice.
The Mrs. and I live in an old apartment building with terrible water pipes. Recently when the upstairs neighbors take a shower, water flows down into the pipes above our ceiling and there’s a leak, so we get a mass of water pooling above our unit bath, which then drips through the edges of the access panel into our unit. We opened the panel and the inside face is covered in mold from the wetness.
The pipes are going to be redone, but the building isn’t responsible for the damage to our unit bath’s ceiling. And — I’m sure you see this coming — the bath manufacturer will not replace just a ceiling, and no longer produces the panel that is the one thing that really needs to be replaced.
The “solution” is to replace the *entire unit bath* at the cost of ~1 million yen.
I want to find a way to put some kind of waterproofing on the outer side of the unit bath ceiling (the side that faces the pipes) and get a new panel. It can’t be that hard to custom-order one 45 cm on a side, with rounded corners, and with a white plastic (?) veneer on the bath-facing side.
This kind of talk will go nowhere with any of the principals in this story, so I’m hoping the expat community has some ideas. A million yen is an obscene amount of money (it’s more than I take home in four months, after taxes) to replace a bath that still works *perfectly* except for the panel.
And while I’m at it: we’ve also got an older toilet, and everything about it is fine, including the electronics, but the seat (which is *hollow* plastic!) has a hairline crack and is eventually going to break. Of course the “solution” is to buy an entirely new toilet at ~200k yen, because the manufacturer, National, doesn’t make that model anymore. *Surely* there is a way to acquire a toilet seat in the same shape as ours, or at least to fill in the hollow space and somehow re-seal the plastic.
I had imagined us making these huge renovations when the time came to move on and rent this apartment out. Renovating now will make any new parts “old” again when renting it out; a dead loss, really. I’m still a little annoyed at how little value the first renovations, which we made when we moved in and replaced the previous owner’s dilapidated bath, have retained.
Ideas highly appreciated!