The apartment building is old. Historic, even. There's a plaque out front that says so.

You know what that means, that word, "historic". It means repairs. It means work you'd rather not do, at times least convenient. It means attention.

Our building is suffering from what can be kindly called deferred maintenance. The roof, though "redone" about five years ago, leaks every time it rains hard. (Note to prospective owners of apartment buildings: 106-year-old skylights will leak and you will never, and I mean NEVER, find the source. Rebuild or remove them.) I texted my landlord about it and then did what always gets done: I found the buckets and placed them strategically in my kitchen and out in the common hallway. (Note to bucket-placers: put a washcloth in the bottom so you don't hear the drips.)

The landlord is out of town for a week. So I went to town on my own.

I placed a bulletin board above the mailboxes so the tenants (seven of us, plus a few cats) could communicate with each other. It's already working well. Then I mopped the stairs, all 22 of them, as well as the foyer. After my neighbor Joey took down all of my recycling (the leftovers of moving back into my apartment), I set up my outdoor dining set in the hallway, complete with aloe vera plant and chair pads. There's no reason for anyone to sit there, but it sure looks nice anyway. If I'm going to stay here a while longer, I want things to look nice. Red rag-rug runner, orange chairs and table, green plant, blue ceramic pot. Nice.

Today I bit the bullet and did what we've all been thinking about doing. I got out the vacuum cleaner and its wands, a screwdriver, tin snips, a new dryer hose from the hardware store and some determination and headed to the laundry room.

A two-inch layer of lint had built up behind the dryer. A lesser dusting of lint covered everything else. Time to vacuum up the lint, investigate why the lint wasn't going where it should go, and fix the issue if I could.

Holy moly. My vacuum kept getting clogged, there was so much lint. I moved the dryer and discovered two of the reasons for the lint - the flexible dryer hose had holes in it, and in fact one end was not attached to the dryer. The other end was fitted through a hole in the floor, which I looked into and discovered that the lint was just going to the crawl space above the garage below us. Um, that can't be safe! But guess what? There was, miraculously, a hole in the wall with a 4-inch flange and louvres. A ha! Dryer vent!

I won't go into the various difficulties that I had getting that damn dryer hose clamped onto the L-bend pipe that went into the wall vent. Between Joey, Nate, Annie and me, we had that thing wedged, clamped and duct taped as securely as possible and we're all just crossing our fingers that it will work.

Then Joey and I went to Taco Bell. Sometimes you just gotta say WTF. Even if you're not Curtis Armstrong.

For before-and-after pics, go HERE.