When we got home from our awesome Kansas trip, we checked our mailbox. In the middle of the huge stack was a water department letter. It basically said that our meter indicated that our water had been running for over 24 hours. They advised us to check for a running toilet, faucet, etc. Keep in mind that we had been gone all week. The letter was dated sept 4th. Fantastic.
So we checked the whole house and didn't find a leak. Then I heard a sound of water in the boys' bathroom. Kind of in the ceiling area. I went up in the attic and didn't find anything. No water damage visible. On Sunday morning (this is why we missed church), I called a plumber. A few hours later, after much discussion and debate over a few hundred dollars (oh the irony), we decided we'd wait until today to have the plumber come to the house.
So at noonish today, plumber arrives and inspects the house, goes to the bathroom, confirms the noise of running water, goes in the attic. After 15 minutes in the attic, comes down and wants a scratch piece of paper to draw me a sketch. He probably wanted scratch paper because he knew how many $$$ were running through my head and didn't want to waste fresh parchment. He then explained to me that it was a leak in the hot water line under (yes, under) my house. At some point when the house settled after the foundation was fixed, a line got snagged and sprung a leak.
What he said after that gets fuzzy because my vision and hearing became impaired, but what I got out of it was that they would be drilling holes in different places in our house to find the line that led to the boys' bathroom. They would then cut off the water supply there and reroute the line to the boys' bathroom through the ceiling. Sounds cheap, huh?
He also explained that while he was up there he noticed that the cap on our hot water heater had been pressure-popped off of the top and that every time the heater "turned over" (which is very often now that there's a leak) a flame was blowing out the top and releasing carbon monoxide from the top of the heater. Translation: HUGE death hazard. I am incredibly grateful that no tragedy has come of this. So he capped off the water heater. He told us to be minimalistic on our hot water usage and to call our insurance company to make sure an adjuster doesn't need to come out first. I did those things and am somewhat still waiting on some details. Either way, we are having him come start the work tomorrow. We do not want our house blowing up or floating away.
So what we thought was going to be an expensive $300 dollar Sunday plumber charge is going to be much more than that. A whole bunch more. But at the end of the day, we are so thankful that nothing horrible happened. We're also thankful that the water company wrote us a letter about the meter. A call would've been a little better, but, hey, beggars (and I really do mean beggars after this ordeal) can't be choosers.
Here's a cute picture that kind of takes my mind off things: little Jack loves to help us move our cars. Please do not call the cops on us.
No comments:
Post a Comment