Drip, drip, drip, drip...

If you will remember back with me to my second post, "Let the Lists Begin!", number two was ripping out the carpet in the dining room where there was a past flood from a burst pipe. When the house was built, Quest plumbing was booming. Well, obviously this particular type of pipes render themselves useless and if they aren't leaking now, they will eventually. Not only are they susceptible to freezing and breaking; but in our case we have problems year round, and particularly in the summer. Living in rural areas means that we have well water from a water service. In attempts to keep water up and flowing for all the summer demands in a great expanse of an area, the service pushes water through to the houses at a very high pressure. Since we have crap plumbing that means that pipes burst, particularly at the joints.

Our philosophy on dealing with the plumbing has been to replace the pipes as they need to be repaired. We can't really afford to overhaul the entire house. So naturally in the few months we have lived there we have had two and a half water leaks!

I say two and a half because in our attempts to quasi fix the second leak to get by until we could properly repair it that weekend, we managed to send the leaking water back up the outside the pipe...
through the wall...
and into our kitchen floor.
I was less than thrilled when we noticed we couldn't keep the water off the floor and thought it was coming through the sheet rock. We really didn't want to have to cut into the wall to repair pipes.

Repairing the second leak was not much fun, it was a joint that had broken and was dripping steady and fast, but not catastrophic by any means. Robbie came out to the house with me after a visit to our local Lowe's and a few hours later it was an issue no more!

The first leak however, while very contained and non-damaging came at an inconvenient time and made for a very frustrating morning...
day...
evening...
night...
the next day...
You see the pattern, it was 2 days before we could fix the issue.

John was in the shower, we were running late getting out of the house (per our usual Monday routine) and I still needed a shower too. Then I hear him yell my name in that voice that means he is really mad about something. He couldn't get the shower to turn off! Apparently the valve in the shower wall had corroded and was not going to shut! To turn off the shower we had to shut off water to the entire house!!

Then, because of our work schedules we couldn't do a whole lot each day to repair the issue. By the time we got off work, stopped to get parts (key problem in the delay in fixing the issue was buying the wrong parts), and got home and into the wall to find/fix the problem meant we were well into the evening when we found out we needed more/different parts. We live 30 to 45 minutes from the closest home repair store. Once you get off work, get home and get good and started in a project - those stores are closed. : (

If we didn't need to replace the carpet before... we sure do now! Just to finish the living room set up so we can move the stacked junk to their respective homes allowing us to empty out the dining room so then, and only then can we rip out the carpet! (We still aren't sure what we're going to put down on the cement slab)