Markus’ Blog

This morning, the next chapter in the endless bird poop story took place. Mediation at Small Claims Court. It sure was an interesting, albeit unpleasant experience. The whole ordeal took about two and a half hours.

It turns out that my assessment of the previous owner’s mind-set was pretty much accurate. No willingness to accept any form of responsibility or admit any wrongdoing (in spite of signed contracts clearly stating responsibilities that were not met).

After both parties made their opening statements, the previous owner said he would be totally open to a dialog and a discussion, but he would not be willing to pay the cleaning bill (as in “not a cent”). So what exactly do you want to talk about then? We already know that you are not thrilled about paying, ’cause otherwise you would have done it already. But we’re not going to walk away empty handed either, ’cause if we were planning on doing that, we wouldn’t have even filed the claim.

Very frustrating and annoying.

We did reach an agreement at the end, but only after we started making concessions and kept going down that path way further than we were originally planning to do. Had it not been for that, we’d actually be going to court over pigeon feces.

Our original claim was for $472. Not willing to actually take this ridiculous matter to court, we first offered to drop the court fees ($160) from our claim and settle for the pure cleaning cost ($312). His counter offer was to pay half the cleaning cost — which wouldn’t even have covered our filing and service fees at court, let alone part of the cleaning expenses. In other words, paying for the cleaning ourselves and not even bothering with court would have been cheaper. So no, that didn’t work for us.

Eventually, we settled for $235 (which is just under half of $472), but what a pain in the rear that was. He still thinks our claim is completely unreasonable. While he did apologize for not informing us about the bird nest (and have us find out by stumbling over it), he still maintains that he did nothing wrong.

To top it all of, he insisted that he would not be able to make a lump sum payment. It will be four post-dated cheques over 3x $60 and 1x $55. One for each month from May till August.

Congratulations! You have successfully managed to drag out this issue for a full year. Bloody hell!

What a ridiculous request! He makes about as much money as I do, his wife makes more. Combined, they thus have more income than we do — and he tells us he has to drag this out for another four months and that he doesn’t have two-hundred-and-a-few bucks sitting around? That’s very hard to believe.

The only good things about this agreement are:

• This is hopefully the end of it — even if it’ll drag on till August — and we won’t have to deal with it for much longer. Just wait and deposit the cheques.
• He’s pretty much as upset and pissed about the settlement as we are. Or in other words: neither party got what they wanted. Sometimes there even lies satisfaction in what you don’t get.

I just hope we don’t have to go back to court to file for a payment order, because he’s not complying with the terms of the settlement.

We have entered the next phase of the bird poop story. Yesterday, we got a letter from court informing us about the mediation session that has been scheduled for mid-April. This morning, I finally filed our reply to their ridiculous counterclaim, where they are asking for almost double the amount from us as to what we are claiming from them. (I don’t have to mention that we disputed every single point of their counterclaim, right?)

I am sure the mediation session is going to be interesting. A gut feeling tells me, this stupid issue might actually make it before court. Why? Because this is not the usual dispute with a contractor or something, where both parties are giving in a little and come to an acceptable agreement.

The previous owners of our condo are obviously not going to give in, otherwise they would have approached us a long time ago to try and work something out. What did they do instead? Ignore our letters and counterclaim imaginary figures that are way higher than the original claim itself. Of course, they are not going to get away with that, but it sure shows their mindset.

We are not going to give in either, not anymore. At this point, only 100% reimbursement for our expenses of getting the deck cleaned (and filing the claim) is going to be acceptable. Would we have been willing to settle for less, back in September or October? Probably. We wouldn’t have been happy, but we wouldn’t have been poops either. Now, however, after all the time and effort spent, nope, now it’s got to be a full ruling in our favour.

What annoys and upsets me the most is the following:

• They ignored our letters on purpose, not taking us seriously, thus forcing us to either give up (and be stuck with a bill that we shouldn’t be suck with) or go all the way. However, they still think it’s our fault that this matter escalated so badly.
• The audacity to counterclaim twice the amount when they didn’t even have any expenses (other than alleged lost wages), pisses me right off. I despise this kind of attitude. I expected them to dispute our claim, yes, but never in a million years would I have thought that they would actually try and claim money from us.

Like I said, it’s going to be interesting, and unless the mediator makes a very convincing case that one of the two parties has almost no chance of winning the case (and the ones not winning won’t be us ;-)), the “pigeons” will end up in court. Come to think of it, even if he or she does make a convincing case that they can’t really win, they’ll probably try anyways — given what we’ve seen from them so far.

Yes, it’s time again for the next episode of the popular Bird Poop Story.

Like I said before, we filed our papers at Small Claims Court back in December, but couldn’t serve them, because the previous owner of our condo was on vacation — till January 29 (not January 15 like originally thought).

Anyways, we finally got their reply today and it couldn’t be more entertaining. They denied our claim, of course, which I kind of figured. If they were willing to pay for the cleanup, they could have offered that a long time ago. So no surprise there.

The fun begins once we look at the counter claim they filed. Yes, that’s right. They actually did file a counter claim, and an interesting one at that. They are claiming the filing fees — which makes sense, I guess. If you disagree with somebody’s claim, you want to make sure you get the money back you used to defend yourself, if the judge rules in your favor. So far, so good.

They don’t stop there, though. They are actually trying to charge us for lost wages. They are claiming 7.5 hours for each of them (husband and wife) at rates between $40/hr and $50/hr. Their reasoning goes like this: the wife missed a full day of contract work, because they had to go to court, hence we have to reimburse her. The husband had to take a vacation day to go to court, hence we have to reimburse him, too.

It’s actually quite amusing, because:

1. Only the husband was named in the claim. Why did both of them have to go to court? To do so was their choice.
2. They live in Vancouver, he works in Vancouver, she works at home. The court’s in Vancouver. How can you possibly spend a whole day at court for this matter. It took Brigette 15 minutes to file the papers. Then there’s travel time. How does that add up to 7.5 hours? — Easy. It doesn’t.
3. He took a vacation day. Why? He could have just taken two hours off. That’s all it should have taken him. Tops.
4. Since he took a vacation day, he already gets paid for it. He didn’t say he took an unpaid day of absence. So why does he want to get paid again by us?

So, quite obviously, they are trying to teach us a lesson here, getting as much money out of us as possible. “You dared to mess with us, now we are going to make you pay for that,” or something along those lines.

It’s going to be interesting when we actually go in and meet before the judge.

Stay tuned for the next episode. lol

From what it looks like, there has been an attempted break and enter one apartment over, today.

When I got home from work, our next door neighbor was outside her condo talking to another tenant or owner (I don’t know if he owns or not). I learned pretty quickly that apparently her lock was busted and that she was unable to open her entrance door even after she had unlocked it. She has some kind of deadbolt or something that they suspected may have ended up jamming the door. Either that or the lock’s just toast. Somebody sure went to work on it.

After talking for a few more minutes, I went to take care of the hungry kitty, and Brigette looked up the phone numbers of our strata council president and the non-emergency number of the Vancouver Police Department (without access to a phone book or computer you’re kind of helpless).

Then I went back outside and took a few pictures. One never knows what good that may do later.

The entrance door in question.

Seen from the top.

The busted lock close up.

Of course we all went and checked out the other doors on our floor. No damage was visible on any other door. Also, we don’t know at this point if anybody managed to get inside that apartment or if they gave up or got scared away.

All in all, it doesn’t make one feel too secure. We’re actually in a pretty good neighborhood and I haven’t heard about break ins in our area, so the whole incident came a bit as a shock.

What sucks for the owner of the condo is that she is stuck outside her own apartment, doesn’t know what went on inside (if anything), and all of that happened on a Friday night after work.

Update

She’s back in her apartment as of 8:30pm or so. The locksmith had a hard time getting the lock open. Apparently the would-be thieves tried to pry the lock open, but it jammed, so they couldn’t get in. He was still out there hammering at 9:30pm, trying to fix the damage.

Since not much exciting stuff is happening, I thought I’d share two nice pictures taken from the second bedroom (office) window, looking North East.

The first picture was taken on January 7:

The second picture was taken a week later, January 14:

Same view, completely different atmosphere.

Looks like there’s some hope as far as contractors are concerned. (I’m not getting too excited, though, as disappointment would undoubtedly follow.)

Anyways, Milani agreed to give us a $300 discount on our bill without much of a hassle. That brings it down to the level we were quoted when we first contacted them.

The next experience, however, is already in the making. We need a tiled backspash installed. Looks like we finally managed to pick a tile that we (a) like and that’s (b) not super freaking expensive. Now it’s time to find and hire someone to tile the area behind the sink. Let’s hope that it will be a pleasant experience — before, during and after.

Does anybody remember the Dont’ Book Milani post from back in October? Back then I described how bad of a job they did — well, the job wasn’t so much bad, they were just taking forever to get it done.

We complained to them back then and they seemed to be listening and taking our concerns into account. Also, they didn’t charge us right away. They said they’d send us a bill (and it sounded like they meant after conferring about our concerns and working out an acceptable solution).

Weeks went by, then months. No bill from Milani. Not too long ago, when I saw one of their vans, I was thinking: “Yes, they were a pain in the ass to deal with, but at least they were decent enough to not send us a bill, because they realized just how upset we were.”

Well, that illusion was thoroughly shattered yesterday evening when I found a letter from Milani in our mailbox. I opened it. Yep, it’s a bill. I read it. I read it again. Then I read it a third time. Then I thought: Those bloody f*cking evil bastards!!!!

Not only did they have the audacity to send us a bill FOUR MONTHS AFTER the fact, they billed us for the ENTIRE TIME (no credit, no nothing). The total comes close to a four-figure dollar amount. That includes FIVE HOURS to MOUNT A SINK for almost $400 (before taxes).

I don’t know where you people (=Milani) come from, but your galaxy sure is a lot different from ours. You guys are delusional if you think you’re getting a thousand bucks from us.

What do we learn from this? Don’t book Milani, DON’T EVER, EVER BOOK MILANI.

Small Claims Court, here we come. It’s been an ongoing issue for the last few months: The fact that the previous owners left our place quite a mess, created a bird shelter for a pigeon with her two eggs and (apparently) refuse to comment on any of that or take any form of responsibility for it.

I’ve said before how we ended up with a big mess on our deck, everything covered in bird poop. Three birds produce quite a bit of that when they live in one spot for about a month and a half. We have repeatedly tried to contact the previous owners via their real estate agent. It turns out she refused to forward our letters (she’s also a personal friend of the previous owner’s, go figure) and it took phoning her supervisor to get that sorted out — or so we think. We have no way of really knowing if she actually passed on our second letter. We know for a fact that she didn’t pass on our first, friendlier letter from back in September.

It looks like they feel either safe that we won’t be able to serve them the papers, because they think we don’t have a contact address for them, or they think we aren’t serious. Either way, somebody’s going to have one hell of a surprise.

There has been no reply in about a month and a half, and it has been made quite clear to them what would happen in such a case (we’d take the matter to court). So the forms are now filled out and ready to be submitted to court.

The latest “fun” news, though, is that it seems like the previous owners were in contact with our strata council about the bird poop on our deck, but still didn’t bother to respond to us in any way shape or form. We found this out only by chance.

UPDATE: Turns out the previous owner is on vaction till Jan. 15. So no luck serving the papers today.

We did some work on our condo today. Minor stuff, but still big, because neither of us is used to doing “handy” stuff around the house.

We put up a towel holder.

And hooks for robes. The first one worked nicely, drlling holes for the second hook, though, we hit a concrete pillar (hidden behind dry wall), so we couldn’t drill a hole deep enough for the screws to fit.

Means we have to go out and buy shorter anchors and screws and try using those. Bloody hell. If that doesn’t work, we have to fill the holes, re-paint and drill new ones. Fun.

Then we went on to hang up our key holder. We wanted it next to the breaker box, but didn’t want to risk drilling holes so close to wires. We decided to go for the opposite wall instead.

Funny thing is: we hit concrete again. So we said “screw it” and tried drilling holes next to the breaker box. That worked, at least well enough. No issues with the first hole and the second hole was almost deep enough before we hit concrete there again. The screw would fit, but the anchor was too long, so we simply cut the anchor and screwed the key hooks on anyways.

Now the key hooks are in the place we wanted them, but we definitely have two holes we have to fill and paint over.

Fun stuff doing work on your condo. Especially if you don’t have any previous experience and you end up with nice surprises like concrete pillars where you had no idea there were any.

Afterwards, I went for a nice walk in the snow to get some fresh air and stretch my legs. There’s a lot of that white stuff out there right now. It’s been snowing constantly for over 24 hours at this point. I took some pictures of the neighbourhood.

That’s the hedge by our rear driveway.

That’s 31^st or 32^nd Avenue. Can’t remember which — and I don’t know the area that well yet.

That’s a whole lot of snow on these branches, don’t you think?

Vancouver does have snowplows. lol Even if it’s not very many (for a city of its size): 27 according to their home-page. This is King Edward Ave.

That’s Mountain View Cemetery.

More of Mountain View Cemetery in the snow.

That’s our building, which means I had made it back home by that point.

Brigette’s mom came to visit, primarily to take a wicker table with two chairs with her (we don’t have the room to keep them). We all just went to the mall yesterday, later we used our new pots to cook and our new Denby dishes to eat dinner.

This morning we finally tried loading table and chairs in the car — only to discover that the table won’t fit, no matter what we tried. Brigette and I, both, had doubts the set would fit in her car. However, Brigette’s mom wouldn’t listen and insisted that she had moved the set in her car before. So, now we still have the wicker set that we were so looking forward to getting rid of. Anybody interested in taking it? Nope, we don’t have a vehicle it would fit in, so we can’t “deliver”.

The rest of my day was better, pretty lazy and relaxed (Brigette ended up being pretty busy with school work). Some reading, some geeking out at the computer, a walkie exploring the neighbourhood and a short trip to Oakridge mall. All in all not bad.