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A Story to Save

This is an email to my parents, but I thought that since I took the time to write out the whole thing, I could also save it here.

Sorry there aren't pictures and it's kind of long, but nobody is making you read it . . . .

Another week gone by with another set of adventures.  The weather was horribly cold and we had a big snowstorm on Monday afternoon.  School was delayed Tuesday, cancelled Wednesday, and delayed both Thursday and Friday.  The cancellation on Wednesday was actually fortuitous because the kids ended up getting Rick’s nasty cold/fever.  Everybody but Emily and Ricky.

Rick was out of town from Thursday through Saturday night.  He went to the FASB conference where all the accounting smarties get together and talk about rules/standards/ how to record numbers, etc.  It’s an honor that he’s invited, and good for his job but honestly, I’m over him travelling all the time.

So, of course, since Rick was out of town we had to have an emergency--and on Thursday night when I was already wondering how I, as the one driver, was going to get the kids to and from their various activities which seem to pile up on each other on Thursday nights especially.  We were home for just a quick 1/2 hour dinner of leftovers (again) before Ricky would be picked up for a basketball game (good thing he had a ride) and I would head to the high school to pick up Emily from her basketball game which I had hoped to actually watch, but just couldn’t get there fast enough after watching Makayla’s junior high game.  Sean ran upstairs saying there was water in the basement.  We have had that stupid thing happen so many times that I almost didn’t believe him.  Sure enough, I opened up the garden room door (which is the new exercise room with a storage closet) and water was pouring out of the heating vent in the ceiling.  YAY!!!  I love water in the basement!!!  Grrrrrr.

So, I jumped into action as best I could.  I turned off the water to the house, searched for some buckets and towels to help contain and clean up the mess and started making phone calls.  Luckily, we have all the junk that was in that room (except for the treadmill) piled neatly in the office due to the fact that we were putting a new floor in the and finishing the walls, painting, etc.  Clean up wasn’t too bad.  Stopping the water was another problem.  No response from the plumber.  Of course, Rick was completely unavailable.  No response from our contractor (although I knew this problem had nothing to due with him and was most likely a frozen pipe--I thought he could help me locate the source of the problem and stop the water).  Though the water was first noticed coming from the heating vent, I traced it back toward the sump pump area of the room (which we turned into a little storage closet).  The light fixture in there was full of water and the drywall on the north wall was bulging and dripping.  More buckets.  More towels.  Despite the water being off, the constant flow from the ceiling was unceasing.  There was nothing I could do then except catch the drips and keep the new floor dry.  (Another fortunate thing is that the new floor is plastic laminate.  You can’t really hurt it).

I cancelled Emily’s piano lessons and picked her up late from basketball.  Meanwhile, a friend of ours who is also a real estate agent (and the girls’ Young Women president) came over to see how she could help.  The contractor’s wife also came.  We determined that all there was to do was to keep the water to the house turned off and constantly empty the buckets until the plumber arrived in the morning.

The girls’ leader was sweet to let them come up to her house to use her shower.  I barely got them up the steep, icy hill and had to turn around and find another route to her house.  I was so relieved when she offered to bring the girls home when they were done because I had left the boys at home (“going to bed”).

I set an alarm to wake me to empty buckets during the night.  A 5 gallon bucket lasted about 3 hours.  I was so glad the dryer worked because I kept rotating towels through the dryer and back down to sop up drips the buckets couldn’t catch.

The plumber came around 8:00 and had found the problem within 15 minutes.  He fixed it soon after.  Guess what it was?  When we moved here in 2008 we hired a few dingbats to help with the big remodeling we were doing.  They worked for less money than a professional contractor and we have been kicking ourselves over multiple incidents since. 

In the north wall/ceiling, the plumber easily pulled away the soaked sheetrock to find two stopped water pipes and an empty pvc pipe as well as an empty McDonald’s cup.  What he didn’t find was what caused the problem:  hardly any insulation and the stopped pipes were closed with temporary caps.  As part of our original remodeling, we moved the washer and dryer and sink from the north wall to the south wall where there was a closet which we took out.   The dingbats did absolutely nothing with the old pipes other than putting temporary caps on them.  In front of the wall in the laundry room, we had lockers and cabinets built, so investigating their work was impossible.  One clue that things were not done correctly was the old the dryer vent.  That room was so cold, so the first year, I thought it was the dryer vent which was just open straight through the wall.  I filled it with insulation.  Still the room was cold.  Six years later, the -25 wind chill finally froze the uninsulated pipes, causing the temporary cap to pop off one of them.   The water kept going and going even after I stopped water to the house because there was a large amount of water in the ceiling and wall waiting to come out.

So, I have a mess and a house insurance claim.  There are fans and a dehumidifier running down there now for 2 days.  And our construction will never ever end.

That story was the worst of it.  There are way worse things than water in the basement or sick kids, but it’s also nice to have a little break.  Oh well.  Breaks are for wimps I guess.  I'm no wimp!

Love,
Bonni

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