Water You Doin’?
The past two weeks I’ve been consumed with moving in and by the end of each day, I’ve been too pooped to blog. And then there was last Friday.
I got to the house about mid-morning with another load of stuff, only to discover a sizable puddle of water on the dining room floor. Uh-oh! I hustled the box I was carrying into the office, and on the way discovered that the water extended into the powder bath on the other side of the dining room wall. Uh-oh! (Or something. I might have used stronger language.) (Sorry, no pictures. Not only did I not have a camera with me, I had other priorities than photography.)
Luckily, the day before I’d brought over all the new towels I’d bought for the house, and it took every bath and hand towel in the house, plus a few washcloths to sop up the mess.
Sort of.
Even after the puddles were soaked up, the water kept coming. Uh-oh! And it looked like it was coming from either under the toilet or worse, from under the wall.
Well, this is why builders carry insurance when they guarantee their work. “Houston” (or Bill), “we have a problem.”
Bill called the plumber who installed all the piping. He was far away but made it to the house around 12:30. (Meanwhile, I’d unpacked the load I’d brought to the house and gone home for a quick lunch and more towels. What else could I do? Turns out there was something, but I didn’t think of it; it wasn’t obvious. More on that in a minute.)
So the plumber checks everything he can think of (except the one thing he didn’t), and says, “I guess we’re going to have to open the wall to find out where the leak is.” Fortunately (we thought), while I was back at the old house, I’d looked through all of the photos I’ve taken while the house was being built and found ONE that showed where that cold-water line came down the wall. OK, that gives us a place to start.
The plumber sawed out the first section of wall. Some of the drywall wasn’t so dry anymore, some was OK. But no leak.
He cut out another section. Same thing. Yet the water’s still coming. Maybe, he said, a nail got into the PEX piping and has only now corroded enough to leak. He found every connection, and bared every bit of the piping below the top of the wet drywall.
Nothing. Hmmm.
“Oh, wait!” he said. He went into the bathroom, opened the cabinet doors, and found… you’re way ahead of me, right? The flash heater that feeds hot water to the sink was leaking. If I had thought to check that, I could have turned off the water to it and saved a little of the leakage. If he’d thought of it first–and he installed it–we might not have had to cut that big hole in the wall. In any case, he shut off the water to the heater, removed it, and will get a new one.
Since then? Dry as a bone.
So now the drywall will have to be repaired or replaced and the wall textured and repainted. And a big load of new furniture, including two buffets that are supposed to go against that wall, is supposed to be delivered on Tuesday.”Don’t worry,” says Terri, the interior designer in charge of the delivery and set-up, “we’ll work around it.”
The good news, I guess, is that this happened now, before that furniture arrived. The wood cabinetry in the vanity is damaged and I expect it will have to be replaced. But that’s about it. And I’d been thinking about going to a meeting in Prescott, Arizona, a five hour drive north of here, on Friday. If I had, and hadn’t gone to the house until today… I shudder to think what I would have found.
It’s Curtains for You
Well, blinds, actually. The other big (and positive) news of the past two weeks was the installation of the “window treatments”–OK, OK, blinds–in the office and bedrooms.
The blinds in the office roll down from the top. Like all of them, they’re translucent so that even when they’re down, some light gets in.
With them part-way down, you can really see the difference.
The blind for the master bedroom is the only one covering a sliding glass door and one of only two that are singles and are not installed in a corner. Here’s a close-up of the material.
The “German” bedroom gets a material that looks like grass. Not exactly Germanic but the color’s right.
Because these windows face north and east, they also get black-out blinds behind them. They’re not perfect at blocking all light because they’re mounted in a corner, but they’ll do a good job.
The blinds in the “Oriental” bedroom are a bit more in keeping with the color theme.
And again they get black-out blinds, for the same reason.
I was going to write about how I’ve been moving in the way Johnny Cash built his Cadillac–“one piece at a time”–but since this post is getting long, I’ll save that for next time. My goal is to be living in the new place by the end of the week, even though the move won’t be complete by then. It’ll be close enough.
My heart did more than skip a beat…I had to grab my life jacket!