The burglars took just about everything else. Now a new homeowner’s Edgewood neighborhood gut-rehab job is back at the beginning.
Adam Bazylewicz expected to have moved with his wife and young children by Christmas into the circa-1920 Victorian home he has been renovating at the corner of Elm Street and the Boulevard.
Instead, after two recent burglaries, he’s haggling with an insurance company to recover some of the thousands of dollars he spent on copper pipes, radiators, and tools that disappeared in two heists within the same week.
He’s putting up sheetrock walls while wondering how he’s going to rebuild the rest of the guts of the beautiful but devastated home that anchors a key block in a stretch of New Haven that perpetually straddles the line between rebirth and decline.
Police are still investigating the robberies, which took place the second week of November.
Bazylewicz, a Polish native whose family came to the U.S. 14 years ago, bought the 3,000 square-foot house out of foreclosure in August for $225,000. His wife was pregnant with their second child. Renting in West Haven, they needed a bigger place of their own.
The house was a mess. It had been abandoned for two years. The pipes had burst; the basement and much of the first floor were flooded. Mold covered the walls. The flooring, the walls needed to be replaced, the plumbing built anew.
Bazylewicz, who has a contractor’s license, undertook the job largely on his own in between 12-hour shifts at his job as a printer in North Haven.
He needed a plumber, though. He called all the companies he could find. Those that bothered calling back said they were booked up.
A neighbor referred Bazylewicz to an East Haven plumber who happened to have plenty of time open. Bazylewicz hired him to help put in new plumbing. They bought materials. The plumber came twice to look over the house and plan the job.
On Nov. 12, Bazylewicz was at the house waiting for the plumber to show up to begin work. The plumber arrived hours late. They went downstairs. Something looked strange.
“I look at the boiler. There had been a big pipe over there. The big pipe is missing,” Bazylewicz remembered noticing. “It took me a couple of minutes; I was in shock. I look around. My power washer is gone. The copper pipes. There were 50 or 60 fittings on the floor; it’s all gone.”
Same with Bazylewicz’s masonry tools, chainsaw. Twenty copper pipes in all. A good $800 of materials, gone. The burglars had entered by ripping a basement window off its hinges on the eastern side of the house.
“I told the plumber, ‘I’m calling the police.’ He said, ‘I gotta go.’”
The police came, took prints. Turned out the burglars wore gloves.
Bazylewicz thought about the burglary. “I had this kind of feeling in my stomach: This house was empty for so long. Anybody could get in this house and steal anything they wanted.” But they hadn’t, not for those years it stood vacant. “The plumbing was still in the basement. Why now?”
Bazylewicz forged ahead, though coordinating work with the plumber was frustrating. He would promise to come each day, then call and say his car had broken. Then his wife’s car had broken. He’d show up for two hours at a time, then leave. He’d speak of having financial problems, of selling goods over Craig’s List, of a brother in Maine who sells drugs, according to Bzylewicz. He acted funny, in Bazylewicz’s opinion.
But Bazylewicz needed to move ahead as fast as possible. He had taken two weeks off work at the print shop to try to get the plumbing done so he could start moving in his wife and child before the cold weather set in. Bazylewicz himself was staying much of the time on the third floor, but wouldn’t be able to once December hit, because of the cold, unless he got the radiators and water working.
Bazylewicz bought $1,200 worth of radiators and PEX pipes. He switched from copper to the special plastic pipes to save money.
On Saturday morning, Nov. 17, Bazylewicz came to the house after work. A neighbor told him that someone had burglarized a home two doors away, a home that’s also under construction. (That home is owned by a group affiliated with the Gan School/ Yeshiva of New Haven. The group’s leader, Eli Greer, said Sunday that the burglars “really failed,” carting away “less than $300” worth of tools. Fortunately, painters had secured most of the tools in a “humongous” lock box, and the burglars apparently didn’t realize the value of the spindles and newel posts in the basement.)
Alerted to this burglary, Bazlyewicz looked inside his own home. The radiators that had been on the first floor — gone. Along with pipes and other materials. Not just on the first floor, but the second, too.
The second floor … the only way the burglars could have gotten there was to climb up beams on the first floor, through a crawl space in a closet. Only someone who’d previously been inside the house on the first floor and taken a good look around would have known how to do that.
Guess whom Bazylewicz was suspecting now.
He called the plumber, told him about the burglary.“His emotion — he was not sad at all. ‘You’re kidding…’ I had a feeling he was high.”
“Is your insurance going to cover my stuff?” the plumber asked.
“My insurance doesn’t want to cover anything right now,” Bazlyewicz replied.
The plumber showed up in a van Bazylewicz didn’t recognize. He took his remaining tools away, as police officers asked questions and watched what was going on.
“The building department and the insurance company,” Bazylewicz told the plumber, “want to know your license number.”
The reply, according to Bazylewicz: “Right now I have enough problems. I can’t give you my license number.” And he left.
The “Plumber’s” Side
The plumber, who’s 26 and lives in East Haven, gave a different story when contacted by phone Monday. He said he’s not even a plumber.
He said that he usually does odd jobs like cleaning drains; he said he lost his regular job recently and has a 7‑month-old daughter to support. He claimed he never represented himself as a plumber to Bazylewicz. He offered to help Bazylewicz do the work, he said.
“I had nothing to do with the plumbing work,” he said. “I was helping him do different odd jobs. He was much pretty much doing his own work there.”
He said that the last time he came to pick up his tools Bazylewicz’s father accused him of committing the burglaries. “I definitely didn’t do it. I lost thousands of dollars of tools. I’m out a lot of money,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now.
“I was having vehicle problems. He knew I was having vehicle problems.”
“He bit off more than he could chew. He way overpaid for that house,” he added.
Bazylewicz responded the man definitely identified himself as a plumber and showed him a plumber’s license when they began work.
Help Wanted
Since the burglaries Bazylewicz has been wrestling with the insurance company, which told him that he wasn’t living in the house and thus wasn’t covered. He’s pressing ahead with putting up the sheetrock — and wondering how he’s going to find the money to replace the plumbing and radiators and get the work done. He’s put his ’99 Volvo S80 up for sale for $4,500.
Meanwhile, he’s staying in a West Haven apartment with his wife, who’s nine months pregnant, and two-year-old daughter, while hustling to meet $1,700 monthly payments on his new Elm Street house.
He could use some help. Anybody want to contribute new piping — or work alongside Bazylewicz this holiday season as he starts over making a Victorian gem inhabitable again? If so, email him here.