Los Balconces,Santiago de la Ribera

I had 3 leaks in my apartment ceilings, one in each of the bathrooms and one in the kitchen. The leaks were from the flat above and with help of the flat above they were all fixed.

The leaks did not appear until tenants were living full time in the flat above and were spotted by my tenants as wet patches and eventually drips. So without tenants these could have gone undetected for ages.

They were fixed by cutting through the plasterboard in the main bathroom and kitchen ceilings and access in the other bathroom thru the false ceiling. The pieces cut out were put back and plastered level. A good job was done by RyF builders and just had to paint the ceiling area.

So my advise would be to look at your celings from time to time for discolouration.

My son and his wife stayed in my apartment recently and he told my that when either of the toilets in the above flats are flushed you can hear the water quite loudly as the noise comes thru the plasterboard ceiling and false ceiling, and at night can wake you up. This is not surprising as the drainage pipe work for for the apartment above runs thru your ceilings.  A bad design?

Has anybody else noticed this?

Somebody broke into my apartment a couple of months ago and stole the safe. If was fixed into the wardrobe ie into chipboard. If I knew this I would have removed and fixed it into the wall and floor.

I have just had a break in into my 2nd floor apt from the unoccupied adjacent apts balcony!

They broke in and opened the safe, stealing my guests valuables.

Basically the safes are not safe!

Anna

Anna,

Very sorry to read this.  That sounds bad that they broke open the door to the adjoining flat.
Why did they not simply break open the door to your flat though?  Did they perhaps think that the adjoining flat was occupied but when discovering it to be empty
they took the easiest route to your flat.

I had noted that our safes were fixed to the chipboard at the bottom of the wardrobe.
This lead me to check back on the developers brochure.    At one time I thought it had read  'wall safes'  but that might be my imagination.
Today the on-line PDF  from RyF  just reads  'Safe / Caja de Seguridad'.

Some thoughts:-
1.  The existence of these devices in our apartments are now encouraging break-ins.
2.  The thieves seem to target apartments that are occupied.  (So far no news of break-ins to empty but furnished apartments.)
3.  The break-ins in DV might all be done by the same team/person.
4.  We probably suffer from the place being too quiet and the risks might increase at this time of year.
5.  We need more estate security - until these guys are caught they are going to continue to do this.

As a upper floor owner I'm a little concerned.  There's absolutely nothing of any value  to steal in my place - I don't even have a TV but  these
guys may choose to waste their time looking and do damage in the process.
 
Do you have any idea of the time of day this happened?  Was it daylight or after sunset?

What kind of tools would they have been carrying?  So large crow bars for sure.
I presume that they must have had some form of bag with them to carry the case in?

Well this has convinced me ! 
I had not used my safe to date.
 And I've now decided that I won't do so.
Being a Yorkshire man I carry very little cash !

But if we do ever get wifi  then I might just fit a movement sensitive web cam linked to home. 

Finally when I come over to stay for three weeks I just identified yet another pastime - burglar watching.

regards,
Paul




This message was last edited by PMillsom on 10/30/2007.

This message was last edited by PMillsom on 10/30/2007.