The building I live in is more than a hundred years old, like most Parisian buildings. Although it looks elegant from the outside, and even from the inside, the insides of the inside are usually ancient-looking. And regularly, there's no help for it, a joint in the ancient plumbing breaks (or even "explose") and there is a leak, major or minor depending on where it is and how long it goes on before someone notices it.
This week we had a minor one. A joint broke in the space between the fifth floor and the ceiling of the fourth floor. I noticed the sound of dripping in an interior courtyard in the afternoon, though it wasn't raining. By evening the ceiling of my apartment on the second floor looked like this, and the water for the building was turned off. Luckily I have an expert coming from the insurance already for the last dégât.
When we were renovating the apartment, I begged the plumbers to check all the joints and replace any that looked too old. They just shook their heads. Too hard to reach, and too expensive to find. No, you just have to wait till one breaks.
My neighbors had one break on Christmas day. Thank goodness they were there, because a Niagara of water was pulsing out of the main pipe to the building, a good six inches wide. Their children had to stand replacing large buckets every few minutes till we could find the main water shutoff to the building. (The concierge was new then. She knows it well now.) The firemen came that time.
