The Other 68 Dart Resto Project

The project got put on hold this weekend due to a small disaster. I live in an apartment building, the bottom floor is where my garage is. Here is the story.

I came home last friday night and saw a bunch of people standing in front of my building with my garage door open and somebody inside my garage. I ran over and found out that there was a fire in the building on the third floor, so I ran up to check on my dog, she was OK, nothing damaged in my apartment, I was lucky, of the 24 units in my apartment building, 17 had significant water damage from the fire hoses and sprinklers. I had one of the lucky 7 apartments that the sprinklers did not go off in. Until I got down to my Garage, which was directly below the apartment that caught fire. I was not so lucky. When I got there, the maintenance man had already vaccumed out most of the standing water, a lot of my tools were soaked and starting to rust. I managed to get most of them cleaned off and dried out, my box of receipts that I kept for everything car or tool related is now a box of paper mache. All my new sandpaper ($100's worth) was soaked. My freshly painted and restored rear end was soaked and some small parts were starting to rust. My brand new 6" vice I bought the night before has a coat of rust. Right now I have buckets catching dripping from the ceiling and the garage smells horrible. Luckily for me, toolboxes have drain holes in each drawer, and the porous rubber matting kept my tools from staying soaked. I have to check my power tools though, and Im not sure I can save my dremel. I had the car windows open, all I can say is thank god for 1960's rain gutters, there did not seem to be any water inside the car, although my trunk was not so lucky since I left it open, I did have the drain pugs already pulled, but the clean, rust free metal inside now has a light film of orange rust. Also, thankfully, my new compressor was shielded inside a wood box, which also shed water because of the coat of paint overspray on top. Since very little was stored on the floor of the garage, I was spared the damage my neigbor had, he had probably a 100 cardbourd boxes full of all kind of stuff all stacked on the floor. I spent most of the weekend throwing stuff out and cleaning up. The Garage smells like a must basement from all the water that came down through the ceiling.

I decided, its time to buy renters insurance.

BTW, the fire was started by the idiot upstairs ironing his shirt and leaving the iron on his bed turned on! What an idiot! He could have killed people and pets in the building. Unfortunately, he was NOT removed from the gene pool last night. I hope they bill him for all the damage!