Aqua Restored

We have water. It was restored about 5pm last night. Barely.

Yesterday morning I cancelled the jillion-dollar plumber and had the plumber who is doing the work to our bathroom come out. Like the first plumber, he confirmed the leak was coming from a spot underneath our bathroom shower where there just isn't enough crawl space to get back in there.  So I had our general contractor come out yesterday, rip up my closet carpet and saw a hole in my closet floor (my closet backs up to the shower), allowing access to the pipe. Apparently just a casing or something had come loose so my GC tightened it up and voila! Water!

The plumber is coming back this morning to confirm everything is tightened up as it should be. Then the GC will screw the plywood back into my closet floor, creating a sort of trap door should we ever need it again.  

I like the plumber. It honestly hadn't occurred to me that the source of the leak was anything other than older pipes. But he said upfront, "No, I'm pretty sure it was something I did when I did the preliminary work to your shower." He apologized and made clear he would set things right on his own time and I wouldn't owe anything to him.

Love that.  I don't mind if people mess up. We were without water for 48 hours and it wasn't the end of the world. But he took responsibility, apologized, and is going to fix it.  You can't ask for more than that.

Meanwhile, this little episode has been useful in helping me appreciate some of the things I usually gripe about. Once we had water I did 3 loads of laundry and was happy to fold and put away clothes. Emptying the dishwasher was a pleasure.  Few things brought me more enjoyment this week than wiping off the kitchen counter tops. It's like being able to see with new eyes. 

I would not have been a happy pioneer woman. Electricity and water--these are a few of my favorite things. 

Burst Pipe III

No End In Sight...

To update, our pipes burst on Saturday night and we were left without running water all day Sunday and into Monday.

Have you heard of those Indian swamis who can go into a meditative trance and will themselves to not need food or water for days? I thought I might attempt to achieve this state. I lasted three minutes and then I had a ravenous thirst and a constant need to pee.

It's funny how even mentally knowing we had no water, we couldn't train ourselves not to reach for it.  For example, I had a glass of saved water sitting by the bathroom sink to use for brushing my teeth. I saw it, I knew what it was there for, yet force of habit made me reach out and turn the faucet on and stare dumbly at it, waiting for the water to appear.

I have been shown how much I take water for granted. Want to take an asprin? No water in the sink. Gotta go hunt some down. Want to do laundry? Nope, not an option. Our dishwasher was already full when the pipe burst. Too bad, the dirty dishes will remain dirty. (I never realized how many spoons we use until the option of cleaning them was taken from me.)

I wanted to wipe the kitchen countertops off only--oops--that would use some of our valuable water reserves.  I am practicing the fine art of bladder control. We skipped showering today but tomorrow will find us heating water on the stove for an old-fashioned sink-sponge bath.

I thought I'd use my time wisely on Sunday and finish up some painting in the bathroom. Except I'd need to rinse the brushes out when I finished, so that was a no go. I read the Sunday paper and had to decide whether it was worth it to wash the newsink off my hands (it was).  The cats got bottled water in their water dish.  I didn't wear makeup because I had no way to wash it off at night.

Frankly, I'm just grateful the toilets work. We fill the tank with water after each flush. It beats running to McDonalds each time.

I just hope they can fix the pipe. One day on the weekend is like, "Ha ha. This is hard!" Once we hit the work week, it switches into "Ha, ha. I'm going to kill myself if I don't get a hot shower!"

Fingers crossed the plumber comes through.

Burst Pipe II

The Adventure Continues...

While Blair was outside with the wrench, I was dialing plumbers in the phone book like a woman possessed.  It's 7 o'clock on a Saturday night and NO ONE is answering. I leave messages on "Emergency 24-hour plumbing hot lines" and keep dialing.

I actually get one plumber on the phone, but he doesn't "do" emergency calls. "Good luck, " he says. "Thank you, you rat-bastard," I reply. (Okay, I didn't really say that. But I wanted to).  Finally, the emergency people call us back.

"We can send someone out, but he's on overtime so it will cost you a jillion dollars an hour," they say.  Oh...they're good. They know when they've got you by the balls.

"Send him," I say.

"And you are accepting of the jillion dollars an hour rate, ma'am?"

"Yes, fine. Just send him."

"He'll be there in 20 minutes. And by the way, that charge will be a jillion dollars an hour."

He was there in 40 minutes and, for someone who makes a jillion dollars an hour on overtime, was a very nice man. But he couldn't find the source of the break. We think the pipe burst near the underpart of our house where only anorexic chipmunks can slide on their belly into the area.  So jillion-dollar plumber man left us on Saturday night with the words, "I'll be back on Monday."

No water until Monday. Not a happy thought. No water means no toilet, no shower, no tooth-brushing water, no hand-washing water, no face-washing water, no coffee-making water (that's where the panic set in).

So we did what we had to do.  Lake in the front yard be damned. We turned the water back on and filled up buckets and pitchers and glasses of water. No running water? Bring it on, baby. We were ready.

Stay tuned for Part III -- "Why Eating Out at Taco Bell When You Have

No Running Water Is Not the Brightest of Ideas."

Burst Pipe - Part I

Thank God for Doritos.

Friday night, 3 AM.  For some reason we are both awake. It's too early to get up, so we lay in bed and talk. I'd had some really weird dreams earlier in the night. Blair actually does get up around 3:30 (probably in an effort to escape my dream talk) but I tough it out and force myself to go back to sleep.

After I'm up, we head into GSO for some shopping. We return home around 3 and, exhausted, we both fall into bed for a two-hour nap.

We eventually find our way into the family room to watch TV. We ate a huge lunch in town and neither of us feel like making a big production for dinner, so I decide to eat cereal and Blair decides he wants Doritos. Only we don't keep Doritos in the house. We have to walk to the Dollar General up the street to buy them.

I offer to go as Blair is still rubbing sleep from his eyes. I make it down the driveway and step over the trickle of water running into the street when a thought occurs to me. "It hasn't rained. Why is there a trickle of water running down our driveway into the street?"

This is big for me. BIG. I never pay attention to stuff like this. And truth be told, I was way off base. Our Ford Explorer is parked in the drive and my thought was, "Uh-oh. I wonder if it's leaking something."

So I followed the trickle up the drive where it became more of a small stream and then into the front yard which, when I viewed it, could most accurately be described as having lake-like properties. I'm pretty sure I saw a duck go floating by.

I run into the house and announce, "The yard's flooded." Blair races outside. And here I must make an aside to say how happy I am to not be the man in this relationship. My part was done. I had found the water, I had announced the water...that's pretty much all I had to offer.  No clue what might come next.

I am so proud of my husband. Being kind, let's say fixing things is not his speciality. (We were in Home Depot on Saturday and he was ooing and ahhing over power tools, sending me pleading glances. "I'll let you buy this one right here if you can tell me what it's used for," I said. He stood still for a moment before he stalked off into the paint aisle, mumbling that I was a cheater.) But he ripped a concrete lid up from our driveway, plunged his hands and a wrench into some muddy water with no visibility and got the water to our house turned off from the street. I didn't even known we had a concrete lid in our driveway and I certainly had no clue that had any relation to turning water off.  I was most impressed.

"Well, that explains that noise," I said, once the water was off.

"What noise?" asked Blair.

"That noise I've been hearing all afternoon. I thought the AC was running and I kept checking to make sure it was off. Then I thought the upstairs toilet was running but that wasn't it either. I couldn't figure out where the running sound was coming from." Blair's eyes are huge. I give a weak smile. "So. Um. Now I know."

BE SURE TO READ PART II OF OUR EXCITING UNDERWATER YARD ADVENTURE!