Misadventures in home ownership

This past Saturday was a regular Saturday around our place. We slept in a little, had a relaxing morning once we did get up, and then we showered and went about our usual Saturday afternoon errands. We went to Target, the liquor store for some wine, picked up some Powerball tickets, and then we decided to head home because it was cold as Christian charity outside. We got home about 3:45PM and I noticed that our water pressure is low, we usually have crazy high water pressure so I knew something was up.

I called the city water department to find out if there had been any breaks in the main line near our house and the nice lady said there had not been but she'd be glad to send someone out to check the line in our neighborhood. Meanwhile about an hour later Sparky says she can hear water running when she stood in the downstairs half bath. So I tore myself away from playing cards on Yahoo to go outside under our deck to see if the sound of running water was coming from there. I went out in the cold and I opened the big door under out deck and I found out that the water was not running under the house, it was FUCKING POURING.

Water was not only shooting from a copper pipe that lead into the line inside the house it was also streaming from another pipe as well. It was a fucking mess. Water was falling faster than public confidence in our idiot President. Lately I've been a pretty handy guy, I recently replaced and rewired our two front porch lights, I filled in some holes in a cinder block wall with some concrete, I unclogged our upstairs bathtub so now we don't shower while the water rises above our ankles, but there was no way in hell I could have tackled the plumbing problem that we had under our place this past Saturday night.

I marched inside and gave Sparky the bad news. She scrambled to find the home warranty company's phone number, we got a home warranty with our house and when we tried to use it after we had our HVAC unit worked on they told us that they did not pay on after the fact repairs and that they had to be the ones to call the repair people and they told us that they had people dispatching folks 24/7 so there'd be no need to worry if something happened on a weekend. She found the number and I called them.

Can you guess what happened next? No one fucking answered.

So I called a plumber. No answer.

Then I called another. No answer.

Then another, this guy finally answered and he said he could be at our place in a few hours and that I should turn the water off at the main line where it comes in to our house. He told me where to find the turn off switch and he asked if I wanted to wait on him. I said I'd call him back if I did.

I called another plumber. This guy said he and his assistant were just finishing up a job and that his assistant would be at our place in about 10 minutes. Bingo.

The guy gets here and he surveys the situation. He tells me, after what seemed like an hour of chit chat, that he can fix it, no problem. He tells me he has to go to Lowe's to get parts and that he'll be right back. I asked him if he could shut the water off first. He says, "Well Duh! I nearly forgot to do that." He shuts it off, I tried before he got there but I could not get it turned off, after thawing the valve. It was frozen shut because it's been super crazy cold here for the past three days.

Chatty Chuck, that's the name I gave him, unbeknownst to him of course, came back pretty quickly from Lowe's with all his parts and he quickly fixed the leaks. He replaced a section of pipe and he connected everything that needed connected. He then told me I should insulate all the pipes we could, we still have some older copper pipes outside under our deck, and that I should wrap all the pipes possible in blankets until such time as I could do all the insulating. He then hit me with a bill for $230. I figured I'd have to shell out about $150, $175 tops, so it felt like he reamed me without even giving me a peck on the lips beforehand, you know, kind of like how Bush/Cheney and corporate America have been doing us for the past 8 years. I gritted my teeth and paid his bill.

After I wrapped some old blankets around my pipes we waited out the night's cold temps. I'm no stranger to having frozen pipes, we used to get them all the time when we lived in Lee County when I was in high school, so I left a small stream of water running to keep ice from forming in the line. I decided that I was going to stay up all night to make sure things went okay. But around 4:15AM I decided I had enough and that since the water was coming in fine I'd go to bed for a bit because I knew Sparky would be up in a few hours. As I went to bed I noticed that the snow flurries that had started falling earlier had now morphed into freezing rain.

I woke up around 11:30 AM and after a quick breakfast of oatmeal with brown sugar and banana I went off on our first trip of the day to Lowe's for supplies. I bought pipe insulation and Gorilla brand duct tape, which I highly endorse now. I didn't buy enough insulation the first trip so I had to go back for more. I also bought a thick towel to cut up in strips and wrap parts of the pipe lines in. As I insulated pipes and taped said insulation in with my Gorilla brand tape, Sparky wrapped up some of our other pipes in an old blanket that she cut up. After what seemed like hours of working in a stooped position under the deck, I was ready to shoot some foaming insulation in some of the crevices where the pipes went inside. But my can of foaming insulation was hopelessly clogged so I sent Sparky off to buy another.

While she was gone I finished insulating, taping, and wrapping towels and blankets around our pipes. She got back and I shot the hell out of the crevices with foaming insulation and after 4 hours of cold damp dirty work we were done. After having to do most of the work while stooped over my lower back is killing me but Mr. Ibuprofen and his good friend Mr. Moosehead beer have lessened the pain. Sparky worked like a champ and most important of all she didn't try to tell me how to do things as we worked so things went pretty smooth, in spite of the cold, the damp, and the stooping.

So now our outside under the deck pipes are all wrapped up nice and warm and they await the cold temps that are supposed to be with us for a few more days. Hopefully, with a little bit of luck though, the worst may be over because the really cold temps don't last long here in our fair city and generally winter itself is done by mid February.

The only problems we're still facing are the fact that the home warranty company never called us back and the water pressure in our upstairs bathroom sink is super low, the water barely trickles out but the bathtub water pressure is fine and so is the toilet water situation. I'm thinking that something got lodged in the line leading to the sink when the water was off and then got turned back on. It could happen, this is an old house and goodness knows what's in some of these old water lines. We decided that when the assholes with the home warranty company finally do call us back were making them send someone out to fix the pressure to our upstairs bathroom.

All in all though, we handled out first home repair mega emergency pretty calmly and with grace under pressure. But I'm telling you right now, I hope it's years before we have to find out how we react to the next home repair mega emergency.