My wife and I have taken the opportunity a few times recently to express to Management and the Board our frustrations with this aging building and its mishaps, and more particularly with the not-always satisfactory remedies available when difficult things happen to our properties.

We thought it only right to take this opportunity to express our great pleasure and satisfaction resulting from Dynamic Drain’s recent work on the 11 and 09 Tiers in the south tower of The Promenade.

I rode the elevator with one of Dynamic Drain’s workers recently whom I’ve become loosely acquainted with these past months, and on that day he was wearing a quite dejected expression on his face. “Hey man. Rough morning?” “Oh yeah,” he replied to me, sounding exhausted already at only around mid-day. “What Tier are you guys working on now?” “14. All the kitchens are blowing up,” he said, shaking his head. “Oh no, that sucks,” I said. “Well, you guys sure saved our ass,” I offered (please pardon my crudity). This seemed to get his attention and spark his curiosity, so I told him our story, which I’ll repeat here and now to you gentlemen.

We bought our unit (411-S) here in The Promenade in late 2010, and moved in on December 27. At 9:00 am the next morning on December 28, 2010, I was in the bedroom and heard a “gurgling” sound coming from the bathroom. I investigated, and to my horror, I found water was POURING out of the toilet onto the floor for no apparent reason. I immediately (or as soon as I got my wits about me) turned off the water and in what has since become somewhat of a ritual, I began scooping the toilet water out of the corner of the bathroom floor into the bathtub with a dust pan. Luckily I was right there, but I’d estimate a good 2-gallon deluge by the time the water was off.

That experience began an 11 year odyssey with our toilet – one we thought might never end without changing out all the pipes in both towers (can you imagine?). Not just mystery overflows – EVERY flush was an adventure – the toilet had to be watched intently for the entirety of the empty-refill cycle because any flush was a potential overflow disaster (clogging wasn’t the issue, the pipes were). On exceedingly windy days, when we would hear the pipes connected to the bathtub drain start to “gurgle” and the water in the toilet start to percolate, we learned to just turn the toilet water off. Sometimes turning on the bathtub faucet and allowing the water to run awhile would clear some of the air out of the pipes; sometimes it would instead cause the toilet to begin overflowing.

Our kitchen too – albeit to a lesser extent. Someone above us has a washing machine installed within their unit, so a couple/three times a week we would walk into our kitchen to find suds overflowing from our sink drain up over the basin and onto the kitchen floor. These suds – they smelled awful, like dank laundry lint, and always had what looked like pieces of ash floating atop the sud-bubbles.

Since Dynamic Drain completed their work on the 11 and 09 tiers here in the south building, all of those issues that plagued us for over a decade have gone away. They simply stopped. Obviously, we don’t miss those days; to the contrary, we feel an enormous debt of gratitude to Dynamic Drain and to the people here at The Promenade who brought them to us. Very liberating to no longer be in constant combat with our bathroom.

Thank you, and please feel free to share our account with other shareholders still awaiting relief and/or with the people at Dynamic Drain.