When Life Interrupts Art

A little over a month ago, our life got a bit complicated.  On Tuesday, June 9, Bruce had gone downstairs to work in his study, but he quickly came storming back up from the basement demanding to know if I had let Jezebel (our very sweet cat) into his office.  His office is kept closed up, but I will let her in if I am downstairs exercising, if she asks (which she sometimes does, in the most polite manner).  She likes to check it out periodically and make sure no small critters are setting up homes in there.  I said that I had, but that it had been a few days, why?  Did she throw up in there?  He replied that there was some cat barf, but that the carpet was all wet around his chair and accused her of peeing in his study.  I was skeptical as this would be extremely unusual behavior on her part and immediately followed him back downstairs to investigate.  On entering his study I immediately noticed a complete lack of the tell-tale smell of cat pee.  I checked the carpet and it was indeed very wet, but it was water, not cat pee.  We had a water leak.  The water line (the picture above) comes into the basement in his study, behind his desk, his massive, modular desk.  There is an access panel, but it only gives us access to the shut off valve for the water in the house.

The spot where the line comes into to the house is below the 2x4 that you can just see in the bottom of the picture, behind dry wall.  So, we spent the rest of the day clearing out that end of the study, which meant moving his massive, modular desk, as well as a heavy credenza.  We then went to the hardware story and bought a water key so that we could shut off the water at the street, as the water was coming in to the house through the conduit that held the outside water line, which should have been porridged (sealed up with hydraulic cement so no ground water could come in) and obviously was not.

The next day, June 10 (Wednesday), we spent pulling up the carpet, and the sodden carpet padding underneath.  We pitched the carpet padding and rigged up some scaffolding to elevate the carpet to allow it to dry.  First we folded it back so that we could get as much water up from the concrete floor as possible.

We propped the 2x4s that are laying on the floor on the saw horse and laid the carpet on them so that it could dry.  

On Thursday, June 11, we cut open the dry wall to expose the leak.

We also brought the dehumidifier in from the exercise room to help dry things out.  

On Friday, June 12, a plumber came by to check the situation out.  He told us to have the leak detection folks come by and verify the location of the leak.  We were pretty sure it was close to the basement wall, under the front porch, based on the way the water was coming in.  According to our water meter, the leak was 0.29 gallons per minute.  When we called the county services folks, the nice lady told us that it looked like the leak had started on May 30.  We didn’t find it until June 9.  Bruce doesn’t go down into his study that often.  The leak had saturated the carpet out to about 7 feet from the wall by then.  It was bad, but it could have been worse.  We called the leak detection company, and Bruce talked to an AI as it was after business hours.  The AI was really good.  They called us back on Monday, June 15.

That outside faucet is in line with the underground water line where it comes in to the house.

On Wednesday, June 17, the leak detection guys came out and confirmed our suspicions as to the location of the leak.  It cost $600 to tell us something that we were pretty sure about.

We called the plumber back, but apparently there are not enough plumbers in the world today, and he is super busy.  He was not able to come out and fix our leak until Monday, June 29.  We had talked to the builder, who lives just up the street from us and he had said that we had all copper pipe coming in to the house.  When we talked to the plumber, before they started digging, we discussed the possibility of just running a new line of the new plastic they use, as the copper is about 35 years old, and is likely to spring another leak but when the plumber dug up the leak he found something else.

Blue hose, and a temporary coupling, that somehow lasted several decades before leaking.  We don’t know when or how this was done, as we’ve been in the house 20 years, and my husband lived in it before us as we bought his ex-wife out of the house, and it was not done during his time in the house.  We have no idea if we have this blue line all the way to the street, or if there is copper.  If we get another leak we’ll deal with it and probably just re-route the water line.  He fixed the leak, and replaced the copper pipe coming in to the house, and also replaced the inside water valve, as it was also leaking.

The conduit is also properly porridged, so no more leaking into the basement!  It cost us $750.  We also picked up new carpet padding so we can get the carpet back down.  We haven’t done that part yet, but we did lay the carpet back over the floor.  We’ll need to do some carpet cleaning, but that is easy.

So what did we do for those 20 days?  We turned the water off, and only turned it on for brief periods of time when we needed it.  That usually worked out to having water 3 or 4 times during the day for an hour or so at a time.  We did use some plumbers putty to try to block the leak, and it mostly worked, until the leak detection folks came by and disturbed things, and then it stopped working so well.  So we always had to have towels down to absorb the water, and then I was dealing with wet towels and swapping dry towels out for wet, and throwing the wet ones into the dryer, or hanging them on our deck railings to dry in the sun.  We filled pitchers with water for drinking, and made sure to fill up the tea kettle and the coffee maker when we had water.  I also kept water in one half of our double sink to rinse things if we needed to.  We have three toilets in the house, but they only got flushed when we had water.  We turned off the valve inside the house before we would turn off the water to the house to keep the pressure up (for the most part) in the house so that we didn’t get too much air in the pipes (the fridge really hated losing water pressure).  Needless to say, it was a bit of a production, and it really makes you appreciate the conveniences of modern life.

And then on Saturday, July 4, during the big storms that hit the East coast, we lost the top of one of our Beech Nut trees, so we’ve been dealing with that for the past week.  We also lost power for three hours, it went out just as we were sitting down to dinner.

All of that greenery is attached to this monster, which managed to miss the electrical distribution box that feeds our house, as well as our neighbors.  It also missed the land-line phone box, not that many folks have land-lines anymore.  Once again, we were lucky.

That came off of this spot that you can just see in the top of our tree.

We’ve been cutting off the smaller branches, which have most of the leaves, so that when we call the tree guys they just have to cut up the big stuff for us.  The top was also a little bit into the road, so we had to clear that off right away on Sunday morning.  In this Virginia heat and humidity it is dirty, sweaty work, and pretty exhausting, so we pace ourselves (we’re not so young anymore).  When we come in from working, we strip and throw the clothes into the washing machine, and then we go take a cooling shower.  Despite the heat, we don’t mind the work at all, and kind of enjoy it.  I especially like flinging the cut branches on to our brush pile in our woods.