a make-do bathroom makeover! ~ Like Mother Like Daughter

Read article : a make-do bathroom makeover! ~ Like Mother Like Daughter

{At the end of this post you will find paint colors to update your almond fixtures, and notes about sources. The Amazon links are affiliate links.}

I have come to that point where either I show you some pictures of my bathroom makeover in its not-quite-complete form or I give up altogether, because in real life, the “done” things very quickly get to be decidedly worn out, even as you are trying to finish up the details.

And that would not be good, would it, for me to wait so long that the new things got old. So that’s what I’m doing — showing you the way it is in real life, namely, not quite done (or ever likely to be!).

I have one million things to tell you.

We redid two bathrooms at once, simply because they are right next to each other and it seemed to make sense in terms of economy of scale. I’m not sure if that turns out to be correct. It certainly makes sense in terms of one’s willingness to return to chaos after one stage has been dealt with. It also makes sense when the second one is completely unusable, as opposed to the first which is just crumbling.

Here is a diagram/plan of our second floor. Those of you who know me well, know my little attempts to give you an overview of things… which may or may not be helpful.

What this is conveying to you, in my own wacky way, is that in an old house, choices have to be made, usually according to things known as “stacks” — places where plumbing gets put in and it’s just simpler to go up with it to the next floor than to, you know, actually put it where it’s needed.

Thus, yes, I go a far piece to get to the bathroom. (The Chief also does, but, you know.) And those bathrooms are next to each other. Because, plumbing.

I will show you the other one at some point. We are putting shelving up and then I hope to!

Here are some befores. Please remember that befores are usually taken at the very last minute, after the leaks have gotten bad and pretty much when the demo has begun and suddenly you’re like, “Let me stop the hating for a minute, just for the sake of the blog.” So don’t judge me too harshly; it wasn’t quiiiittte this bad. Well, not till the very end.

BEFORE:

The leaks had sprung, and that’s what the towels are all about. In my dreams, I would have had an upscale construction company come in here and gut everything, and I would have put in black and white tile and white porcelain fixtures. There would be a freestanding tub with a shower; I don’t see what’s wrong with that! I like it, and it’s old-fashioned and timeless. Plus, way easier to bathe a baby in, versus a dumb jacuzzi and too-small shower.

However, that was not to be.

It’s just too expensive to rip out these built ins. Let this be a warning to you! Try not to build things in. That tub — not going anywhere. Likewise the vanity. It would just cost so much to replace it with its built-in sinks.

That meant that we had to work with the almond. I know. But because of that, I’m here to tell you the best way to do that in terms of decorating!

BEFORE:

Somewhere along the way, when I was still nursing that black-and-white dream of mine, we replaced the old almond (terrible and malfunctioning) toilet with this nice white one.

My reasoning — what would be the point of putting in new almond one if we were on track to gut this bathroom and make it all NOT ALMOND?

Yeah. After crunching the numbers (and recovering consciousness, and paying the tuition bill), we did end up getting one to match, and this beautiful white number is in the new laundry room.

Now, I want you further to note the golden oak trim. Baseboards, windows (sorry, no befores of that), and the radiator cover. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to incorporate almond fixtures and golden oak trim, and then I came to my senses.

The trim was getting painted.

AFTER:

I took the radiator cover down to the garage and spray-painted it. It’s at times like this that spray-paint earns its keep. Painting all that metal screen with a brush would have been a nightmare of drips and surfaces!

I also spray-painted the radiator underneath. It had been white and the white showed through the mesh and contrasted with the black. However, I would not do that again — spray painting inside is not a good idea!

We got a bigger shower. The space above the new wall is open on the theory that air circulation is a good thing.

The trick with the almond is to go a bit darker on the walls, and a white-leaning-towards-gray-taupe (taupe is beige with black in it, or brown/black with white in it, however you want to look at it) for the trim.

Black accents lift everything up out of the 70s-90s. I painted the light fixtures black and got new glasses for the sconces.

I do really love the flooring. It’s vinyl plank (not laminate sheets). It’s completely waterproof and floats on the subfloor — in this case, partial tile and partial plywood. Just covers it all up and provides a warm, easy to clean surface. I love the color of it.

I call it “Escape from Golden Oak.”

The paint and a bunch of the black we had already decided on in the last go-round (the real before featured blue wallpaper, which, who puts wallpaper in a bathroom I ask you, and blue is not a good way to uplift almond). The vanity had been golden oak; I hadn’t thought to take a before picture (there is a similar one on this blog), but I was very pleased with how the hardware went from blah to fab, just with the color change.

We did update the faucets. Surely you can see why…

BEFORE:

AFTER:

I will say that the surround of the tub and the countertop and backsplashes are all Corian. I like that surface. I would have liked it not to be almond, but oh well.

One little note you might not think of: The nice-looking black and chrome toothbrush holder from Target (as seen in the before pic just above)?

No good.

No matter how much you rinse the toothbrushes, the dried residue is white! Making your holder look gross. I spray painted mine white.

There are nice touches in old houses…

Before:

After:

Things I would do at some point:

Touch up the black of the vanity and the frames of the mirrors

Spray paint the towel ring between the two mirrors black

Replace the window over the tub so that it opens (which, among other things, would allow for it to be cleaned on the outside; it’s over the roof of the garage, so a cleaning isn’t happening otherwise!)

Replace or paint the faucet of the tub

Line the curtain to make it look a bit more substantial — this requires coming across a good length of muslin at some point

Paint and sources:

Walls: Olympic, Sienna Sand (which may be the Benjamin Moore name which we originally used, but they can make it at Lowe’s)

Trim: Valspar Cliveden Mist (first we primed the oak well)

The black is just some random black in the case of the vanity (I don’t remember, but just don’t get a blue-black) or black spray paint

Ceiling paint: Take a tip from me and use glossy paint for your bathroom ceilings, preferably one that is mold-resistant — this was a huge upgrade from the regular ceiling paint that had been on there before

Flooring: Shaw’s Matrix Regency Vinyl Plank Flooring in Gunstock, from Lowe’s (I bought this after buying a similar product from Home Depot; I was actually hoping for a lighter color (which I think doesn’t show as much dirt). I was checking out with enough flooring for both bathrooms and caught sight of a sample laid out. My, it was ugly! So I turned right around and returned it all! After much texting of photos to Rosie and a considerable amount of agonizing over the fact that some colors are in stock and some are decidedly not and anyway how are you supposed to tell, I found this one at Lowe’s. I love it.)

Toilet: Gerber

Shower: Got it from the plumbing supply store — it is 5′ wide and has a built-in seat! The door is from Lowe’s and is suspended from the top, making it easier to clean

Faucets: Ufaucet from Amazon. These are very nice and the pop-up drain is metal, not plastic, and the price was right

Towel racks/hooks: Spray painted regular hooks black; Phil made the peg board; carved wooden hook from Marshall’s

Paris map: Available at art stores that sell wrapping paper, for under $4, or here on Amazon for more. I decoupaged it onto a spray-painted piece of particleboard that we had, so the whole thing cost me $5

Curtain fabric: JoAnn’s

Other art: Thrifted, or decoupaged greeting cards — the “abstract art” is actually a picture of a Gee’s Bend quilt, and however much a source of contention it is in my family, I love it for the sweet thriftiness it represents

Shout-out to Bridget who helped me choose the fabric and who did a lot of painting!

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Here are Ten Terrifying New York Housing Stories to Mess Up Your Day

Read article : Here are Ten Terrifying New York Housing Stories to Mess Up Your Day

There are so many ways housing in New York can go wrong: a Craigslist scam, a crazed roommate, a radiator that screams like a jet engine without heating the apartment, or, best case scenario, just an enormous rat king that takes up residence beneath the stove. But no matter how bad you think you’ve got it, this Reddit thread of terrible apartment stories has something worse. There are wolf spiders and screaming junkies and cockroaches. Thousands and thousands of cockroaches.

There are dozens of stories on the thread so far, many of them involving vermin, poop, and various kinds of roommate mental instability. Here’s a sampling. Let’s start with the ones that are funny in an awful way and descend downwards, ending with the the stories that make us retch with despair and our souls long to leave our bodies. Gird yourselves:

(All reactions courtesy of Reaction Gifs and Giphy)

– See also: NYC’s Ten Worst Tenants

10. Odd couple:

I had a roommate that was a hippie. She didn’t shave, use deodorant, work out, etc. Her parents dumped $500 into her bank account weekly. She never did laundry. Dishes (including mine that she and the other suitemates would use) would end up growing ecosystems when left in the sink for weeks. I had to wash my dishes in the shower and kept them in my room to avoid sharing. She would have weekly movie viewing parties on weekdays like Tuesday and Wednesday in the living room with far more people than should fit in that room until 2 AM when I was trying to study or sleep. Pubes consistently everywhere in the bathroom. (Mine were a different color so that eliminated that problem.) She took fiber supplements and took the most massive shits that left shit rings in the toilet after she flushed. (Earning her the nickname “Queen of Saturn” from me and my boyfriend.) The final straw was when she left a used tampon behind the toilet. Still don’t understand how you miss throwing it out/dropping it into the toilet.

Appropriate reaction:

9. Kool-Aid Man sounds like a real dick:

A guy I used to be friends with lived in Queens and his neighbor was FUCKING crazy. One day while he was at work, his neighbor busted through his wall like Kool-Aid man, leaving a man sized hole in the wall. His neighbor thought my friend was fucking his wife and wanted to kill him.

Appropriate reaction:

8. Ordinary Williamsburg Apartment:

While looking for a place I went to look at a place in East Williamsburg kinda near the Morgan L. It was a loft with about seven ramshackle bedrooms with eight roommates already, some stacked on top of each other, most of them closed off with cloth instead of doors, the whole place was probably about a 750sq ft. The shower didn’t work and was made from a plastic water tank and some tubing and was located in a closet along with two cats’ litter boxes.

The table in the main room was covered end to end with empties and then there were stacks of empties near the windows and alongside the walls. When I asked the roommates what they did for fun “We drink a lot.” The “room” was a 5 foot high cubby box up a step ladder with no door.

They wanted 800 dollars a month for it.

Appropriate Reaction:

[

7. Love story, with weed:

I was a subletting from this young couple in Queens. Everything was going decently well other than over hearing a few verbal fights between them. Then one day I get a call from the girl’s sister asking when I was going to be back at the apartment, because both of my roommates were in jail.

Long story short, it turned out that she assaulted him and he defended himself, then they both called the cops on each other. The cops came quickly, and they forgot that they had left a POUND of weed out in the open.

They used my security deposit on bail, and the girl apparently snapped and had a mental breakdown of some sort. She accused me of being a cop because on my license I used to live on a street that ended with “Court.” So she apparently thought I lived in a courthouse or some shit. I noped out as soon as I could and found my own place.

Appropriate reaction:

6. Furniture party:

I once had one of my roommates move out on short notice and had to rush to find a replacement. My other roommate found someone through her coworker that needed a 3 month sublet. The girl came over on 2 separate occasions to take a look at the apartment and the room, and decided that she wanted to move in, everything seemed to be going smoothly.

My first red flag was when she asked me the day before moving in if it was okay for her to bring a “large desk and small couch” that she really didn’t want to part with. Now, my apartment is a loft so it’s pretty open feeling, but it’s not actually that big, the bedrooms are tiny, and it was obviously already fully furnished. I told her we could try and find room for it, and she assured me that if I ended up not being okay with it she would move them to storage.

The next morning she came with movers to bring her bed, dresser and the aforementioned furniture. The couch actually fit okay, and we propped up the disassembled desk in a corner – a slight eyesore but not too in the way, I could live with it for a few months. Sublet girl left to get the rest of her personal belongs, and my roommate and I left for a friend’s barbecue for the day.

What we came home to that night was surreal and terrifying (I should add that we ate a pot brownie and were super-duper stoned.) When we entered we found what appeared the be the entire contents of another apartment in our apartment. Tables, stools, chairs, dressers, a standing keyboard, floor lamps, table lamps, full length mirrors, a full set of pots and pans, plates and flatware, a toaster oven, and just boxes upon boxes of things. You could barely walk it was so cluttered.

When we told her that she had brought way more stuff than we agreed to she started insisting that she could make it all fit. Apparently, she had planned on just getting rid of most of her furniture but “at the last minute realized it would be a waste of money” (she seriously phrased it just like that,) so she had her dad help her bring it all over while we were gone. I told her there was no way it would all fit and that she would have to move the stuff into storage (as she had previously offered) and she flipped out. She started screaming about how I thought I knew everything was generally very rude and insulting, telling me how I “must have never lived with roommates before.”

As she became more aggressive I really started to freak out, realizing I was going to have to kick this girl out. I had to just leave the apartment at that point to avoid a full blown panic attack. When I came back I told her that this wasn’t going to work and she had to find somewhere else to live. She continued to be angry and aggressive, screaming at me and throwing a fit, but finally agreed to have all her stuff out by the next week.

Appropriate reaction:

5. The Double Move:

For a few months during the Summer of 2009 I was floating between different living situations in Greenpoint while waiting for a more permanent place to become available.

One location was near McGolrick Park, which I found on Craigslist. I checked out the room and met the roommates, and it seemed ideal for the month or two I’d be there. I rented the U Haul, got a friend to help me move, packed up my belongings and moved them to this new spot on the top floor of a four floor walk up. It took a good part of a day, and as is customary, I took my helper friend out to dinner after the move.

After dinner I went back to the new apartment to unpack and setup my bed. I get in the front door, turn on the lights, and the walls and floor are moving: cockroaches of all sizes, thousands of them. I’ve never seen so many roaches. I stood there in disbelief. Fear turned to anger.

I called up my buddy and told him the situation. He offered me his couch to sleep on for the night, so I headed down to Williamsburg.

The next day I went to work and told my coworkers the story. One of them knew of an open apartment down the street from the infested place that I could use for two weeks. My boss told me to deal with is ASAP, so I left work, went back to U Haul, packed my shit up and moved.

Moving twice in a 24 hour period is not fun.

Appropriate reaction:

[

4. Shower Party Favors:

The ceiling above the bathtub dripped for over a year. Luckily, it was the best place to have a leak. But the thing dripped almost daily.

The super, management and 311 were called on a biweekly basis. The super would come, paint over the leak and the new paint would fall into the tub with that night’s dripping.

One day it was real bad. Water bubbles appear all over the ceiling, a stream of water running down the walls. The super told me he’d be over in 20 minutes. I wanted to take a quick shower, so I hopped in. I stepped forward to pick up the soap and the ceiling caved in on me. But it wasn’t just the drywall, oh no, the ceiling had all sorts of goodies stuffed in it: a Trader Joes bag, tiles, sponges, t-shirts, towels, rags, tupperware. It was as if the previous tenants made the same complaints and the super just stuffed junk in to absorb the leak.

The super repaired the leak by patching the hole, and the whole process repeated itself over and over again. He told me there was no leak.

After over 20 calls to 311 a lawyer contacted me (how did they find out?). I told management it just three weeks ago they retiled the bathroom upstairs and redid our ceiling. It hasn’t leaked since.

Appropriate reaction:

3. All the rats everywhere:

I was living in Bushwick, and after Sandy, a lot of Brooklyn’s rats got pushed inland. One night i heard a rustle, something got got on a plastic bag. It was too loud to be a mouse. After investigating my girlfriend and I found large droppings under the sink, so we invested in glue traps. The next night, the rat got into a bag of cadbury eggs left on the table. So I think: great, they like chocolate. I put the eggs on the glue traps hoping it would catch it. The next morning, I woke up to see all of the eggs plucked off. Smart bastard. So instead of placing the glue traps in different parts of the kitchen, I put them all together like one large glue trap valley, and this time it worked. Later that night I heard a squeaking and the rat got all jumbled up in traps, hysterically scampering across the floor. I had to throw another glue trap on top of it, making a bit of a rat-trap sandwich. I knew I had to kill it as reminded by my girlfriend, standing on a chair screaming bloody murder — it was honestly the largest animal I’ve ever had to kill. Rising to the occasion, I crushed it with my foot until the squeaking stopped. You know in movies when the villain suffocates the person in the hospital with a pillow? It was kind of like that.

I lifted my foot and took a deep breath — sending a prayer out to the rat gods. There was silence for a moment. An then it started squeaking… again. Because, as I would find out later, rats can RESTART their fucking hearts. So we go through the whole excruciating scene again, with the suffocating with the foot like the villain with the pillow in the hospital until this time I was sure it was dead. I didn’t pray to the rat gods that time. Undead fucker.

Crisis over. Right? What I didn’t know was that, when you see one rat…it means there are hundreds. Rats are routine based, they have a list of stops per day, and if they put you on their schedule, there is no way getting off of it. So it began that every night, as soon as the sun went down, they came. Like gremlins. The following things actually happened:

• woke rat up after getting home from work, was sleeping in my sweater
• rat jumped out of garbage, as I was discarding soup contents.
• woke rat up after getting home from a show, was sleeping in my bed.
• scratching, lots of scratching everywhere.
• dead rat under kitchen table
• rat staring at me having sex
• rats playing in the walls. loudly.
• two rats hiding out in my kitchen
• rat poop on my bed

Appropriate reaction:

[

2. Wild Kingdom:

Used to live in a five bedroom basement apartment in Alphabet City. It was gross, and dark, and damp. We kept it very clean though, and the rent was absurdly cheap so I was willing to put up with literally anything, including:

Lots and lots of wolf spiders. Wolf spiders in the bed, wolf spiders in your shoes, wolf spiders crawling on naked girlfriend’s back as she slept.

A thousand times more of those whiskery centipedes. We got used to those and just let them live to help us out against the…

Massive waterbug infestation. Every. Single. Morning. I would hunt and kill a huge cockroach before taking a shower. But that was fine by comparison because…

A rat died in the bathroom ceiling, it wasn’t the first (we’ll get to that later), but it led to…

A huge infestation of maggots dropping out of the bathroom ceiling fan on naked female roommate as she was about to get into the shower. Those weren’t the only larva in the bathroom though, at another point we had these really long thin worms attacking our toilet brush.

Unstoppable regular cockroaches everywhere. Every single appliance would have tiny dead cockroaches in the little LED screen. We were like “fuck it” though because you can only kill so many bugs in a day.

Then there was the rat invasion. Somehow rats managed to work their way into the walls of the apartment from the front of the building. We’d hear them running across the ceiling, fucking, fighting, etc. I’ll always remember the Beijing Olympics as being punctuated by the screams of a constant rat orgy. Then the exterminator came, and then we had a solid New York summer of decomposing rat smell.

And yet, despite all this the place remained populated (not by me, but by other roommates) all the way up until Sandy took it out.

Appropriate reaction:

1. Oh dear God:

I had neighbor a few years ago. It was an older woman who apparently let a war vet stay with her some 2 years before I moved in, but he was only supposed to be there for “a few weeks”.

Well I frequently told my landlord about the very wrong noises, shouts, screams coming from the apartment. Sometimes so loud I’d leave my apartment to go to the bar and I could still hear the sounds all the way down the block. Moans, yelps, “fuck me, fuck you”, whimpers… very disturbing stuff.

The cops would sometimes spend an hour or more when they’d get called trying to get in, or get the guy in question out. I watched him take on 12 officers in a scuffle outside our doors in the hallway, him spitting, swinging, yelling “I’ll KILL you!” usually followed by “Just KILL me!”… Always with the same end result. Dude getting put on a gurney and mask looking like Hannibal.

After almost 2 years of living next to this, the landlord got eviction granted. The woman was taken to the psych ward and put under suicide watch and some family of hers was contacted. Apparently the war-vet was physically and mentally torturing her and another war-vet that was a quadriplegic. Blood letting, drugs, fucked up fetishes… the dirt/disease and stench of the place when they finally started clearing it out… My landlord likened it to “Up the river in Apocalypse Now” in terms of depravity.

After that the roaches largely left the building and now there is a nice family living there.

Appropriate reaction: That one is too terrible for a funny GIF. Never mind. We’re very sorry for ruining your morning.

Is water the next 'drug' for Mexico’s cartels?

Read article : Is water the next 'drug' for Mexico’s cartels?

Aug 14, 2017

What it's like when narcos run your privatized water system, Tamara Pearson reports.

A pipa, or water truck, filling up the underground well for shops in Puebla city. Credit: Tamara Pearson

It's rainy season here in Puebla, Mexico, and water is dripping through my concrete roof, taking chunks of plaster and paint from the ceiling with it. Ironically, we still don't have enough running water to shower everyday. Other people here have no running water at all, and our drainage system is in a state of utter abandonment.

Yet we all pay 10 times the rates of the rest of Mexico, because here in Puebla – unlike the rest of the country – our water is privatized. What's more, the men at the helm of the consortium that run it are a collection of corrupt millionaire and billionaire businessmen who have allegedly laundered money for some of the region's biggest drug cartels.

Throughout much of Mexico large, usually black, tinacos (water tanks) dot the roof tops of our concrete slums and towns. A lot of us have running water for just 15-30 minutes, twice a week, so we fill up the tinacos to cover the rest of the time. Many of the older tanks are made of asbestos, while the newer ones are a solid black plastic. A friend who lives around the corner has only a large container of water in his bathroom, while those in wealthier areas often have underground storage and much more regular water.

Most of us, however, have just 400 litres of water to last the household a week. In the US, a single person consumes that amount per day. In my home, we wash our clothes in a bucket, recycle that water to flush the toilet, collect the water from the shower for flushing, and only flush around once or twice a day. Showers are quick and had every three days or so.

My water bill is 630 pesos per month, while in neighboring Tlaxcala state, people pay 50 pesos per month. Everyone here has stories of being unfairly charged for water, or of going without any water for a year or two – despite constant complaints to the water company, Aguas de Puebla.

I was duly awarded a debt of 115,000 pesos when I first moved into my tiny apartment, located in the poor side of inner-city Puebla. For perspective, that's nearly four years’ worth of minimum wage. I spent four months battling the water company to get that corrected – spending 45 minutes each way on public transport to talk to them directly in their head office, and ringing them on a daily basis. Each time, they asked me to bring in more documents, placing the paperwork burden on me, instead of on themselves as the ones who made the mistake. They gave me excuses and promises that it would be resolved in three weeks’ time and to come back then, and even redirected me to other departments – ‘I'll put you through to water meters, maybe they can help with your case.’

Ultimately, some firm phone calls to the head of public relations of the company, with support from an incredible journalist friend, saw me meeting directly with PR, finally, the figure was fixed in their system in a matter of minutes. At the time, I put it down to the bureaucratic, inhumane habits of private corporations, but later I would realize just how much more sinister the problem was.

Water tanks on the rooftops of inner-city Puebla. Credit: Tamara Pearson

Illegal privatization

‘Baja California was the first state in Mexico to plan to privatize its water, but protests and resistance stopped that. Puebla was the second state,’ Fernando, an indigenous water activist in the Peoples Against the Privatization of Water group told me. He asked that I not include his last name, given the arrest warrants pending on a number of water activists, and the risk involved.

In 2013, the Puebla state government justified the privatization of water by arguing that the incoming company would invest the money necessary to improve the service, eliminate leaking pipes that saw 30 per cent of all water lost, and expand the reach of piped water. It passed the Water Law, that would allow the new company to set prices without oversight and to hire other private companies, and put out a call for bids in September that year. The government awarded the bid to Concessions Integrales, also known as Aguas de Puebla, three days before the consortium was actually formed and legally able to participate in a bid for tender. Though the governor had talked about a 30 year deal, that was extended to 60 years.

Narco business

No one imagined that one of the main companies behind Enrique Peña Nieto's presidential election campaign in 2012 would ultimately end up running Puebla's water supply system, in a consortium made up of other corrupt and scandalous companies.

Monex, Epccor, and Grupo Financiero Interacciones are the main companies involved in Aguas de Puebla, though reports of their exact shares in ownership vary. Monex itself told the press that it owned a ‘third’, but added that exactly who has how many shares was a ‘banking secret’.

Monex made news at the time for running Peña Nieto's campaign strategy of buying votes through the distribution of pre-paid cards, and funneling money to his campaigning fund. Reports suggest that this money, however, likely came from the Juarez Cartel – one of the oldest and most powerful criminal organizations in the country.

Mexico's election court ultimately ruled that there hadn't been any fraud, but many are skeptical of this ruling because Mexico's courts are known for their extremely high levels of corruption and political interference. Additionally, it wasn't the first time that Monex had allegedly been involved with major drug cartels. An investigation conducted by newspaper Reforma found a working relationship with the Arellano Feliz cartel in 2003, and with the Colombian cartel, Valle del Norte, in 2006. In 2008, Spanish authorities found that the Beltran Leyva cartel had changed some 78 million euros through Monex and a company called Intercam.

Epccor is owned by Juan Gutierrez, who is also president of Aguas de Puebla, and who also owned the company Gutsa, a key financial backer of the 1994 PRI presidential campaign (Peña Nieto's party). Gutierrez's companies have been repeatedly fined for mismanagement. Epccor, with it connections in the government, regularly receives contracts for public works like hospitals, roads, and airports; consistently spends more than it originally declared in its budget, and delays completion by years. The most recent case was a hospital which has spent nine years so far under construction, and still isn't finished.

Grupo Financiero Interacciones, run by the infamously corrupt and excessive rich Hank family, has strong links to the PRI and to the Juarez Cartel. Grandfather Hank, Carlos Hank Rhon, is a billionaire, and his family has been the subject of numerous reports of drug laundering on a massive scale, as well as assisting cartels with drug shipments, and large-scale public corruption. A World Policy Report from 1995 went so far as to describe Carlos Hank as the "primary intermediary between the multinational drug trafficking enterprises and the Mexican political system,” and Hank has been investigated for money laundering by Mexican, Swiss, and French judges.

One key strategy Hank is alleged to have used, was to buy food products with the money cartels made from selling cocaine in the US. Hank's companies had a monopoly on these food products, which they then sold back in Mexico. The Hank family has also colluded with Mexican state authorities to gain permits for their rooster fighting and horse racing, and to get significant debts pardoned. Son Jorge Hank Rhon has also been accused of using the gambling business for drug trafficking links and to launder money.

An Aguas de Puebla office. Credit: Tamara Pearson

A broken system

With corrupt narcos running Puebla’s water, it's no surprise that the system is beyond dysfunctional. People have accused the company of charging for non-existing debts, of water supply issues and random bill increases, and of charging up to 3,000 pesos (a good month's wage) for meters to be installed. Some areas are supplied with contaminated water, whole suburbs have gone without water for weeks, the company charges to check people's broken connections, and people report that their meters aren't working but the company refuses to repair them and keeps charging an incorrect rate. People facing errors like mine tend to wait a year for a resolution, if they get any at all.

In May this year, communities from the south of the city protested and closed roads after going weeks without water, while Aguas de Puebla still charged them for it. They said that when they did get water, it ‘smelt bad and was yellow,’ while other communities went for three months without water because the company couldn't be bothered to fix the pump.

Businesses have also complained about large bills, pointing out at least six companies in the city that have monthly bills that amount to millions in pesos, ‘without a clear explanation why,’ they told a press conference.

Internally, workers at Aguas de Puebla have also complained stating that they were threatened with being fired on a daily basis and weren't paid promised bonuses. They said they were told not to inform people how rates were calculated, leading to people paying more than they should and they also claimed that the company had cut the petrol budget for company vehicles by 60 per cent, making it difficult for workers to go out and do repairs.

Aguas de Puebla does roll out the red carpet for some of its clients, however. ‘Many years ago, governor Mario Marin signed an agreement with Nealtican and Santa Maria Acuexcomac – towns in the valley of the Popo volcano – for their water,’ Fernando said. In exchange, the towns got sports courts and roads, but their good quality water is delivered by Aguas de Puebla to the wealthy part of town – Angelopolis, while ‘the worst water goes to the poor suburbs, where there's scarcity.’

Jugs of water for sale. Credit: Tamara Pearson

Nothing lives without water

‘We can live without petrol, without electricity, but not without water. The government and the companies it colludes with think to themselves, if petrol is hugely profitable, how much money can you make from water?’ Fernando explained.

Indeed, even before the narco companies took over our water, it was already a big-profit industry and essentially privatized. Those facing water shortages, and those who can't drink their piped water, are forced to buy bottled water from private companies.

In 2014, Mexico was the largest consumer of bottled water in the world with almost US$8 billion in revenue that year and 234 liters consumed on average per person annually. The companies dominating the bottled water industry here are Danone (47 per cent), Coca-Cola (19.4 per cent) and Epura (7.1 per cent). Many people buy water in 20 litre jugs, or garafones, and in that case, small, local water providers account for around half of the market.

People lacking piped water will also pay pipas – large trucks that look a bit like tanker trucks – to pump water into their roof-based plastic water tanks. In Mexico City, some 40 per cent of water distributed this way is sold illegally.

The bottled water companies have also waged marketing campaigns to promote distrust in the quality of piped water.

Across Mexico, some 9 million people have no water pipes in their homes and a further 13 million people have piping, but the water is contaminated and leads to skin conditions and gastrointestinal infections. Seventy-five percent of the population live with water scarcity, but big business won't be offering a hand any time soon.

Tamara Pearson is a long time journalist based in Latin America, alternative pedagogy teacher, and author of The Butterfly Prison. She blogs at Resistance Words.