You know how sometimes you just get that funny feeling that someone - or something - is sneaking up on you and just about to get you? Like, say, your house? Yeah, me too.
When we moved back to AR, both J and I were adamant that we did not want a new construction house. We'd had that for the last several years, and from what we'd seen, new construction meant a complete clear cut of any trees that were in the neighborhood. So instead of looking at new construction, we intentionally looked at older houses. I'm not talking 100 years old or anything; just a well established neighborhood that had large trees and no cookie cutter houses. We found a house that worked with a nice large yard and moved in.
Over the last two years, we have come to expect the fairly minor maintenance issues that come with having a not-so-new house. That's just part of the deal. The plumbing, however, has been an issue nearly since we moved in; it resulted in my encountering what I have to call one of my top 3 most disgusting situations/jobs ever. Actually, that situation and rotovirus diapers are probably tied for #1 - but I digress. Let's just say that the plumbing / sewer lines in this house have me perpetually nervous, and leave it at that for right now.
For the last few days, things have felt a little "off" in the house. Last night, they went completely haywire. Sometime yesterday afternoon, I noticed that one of the toilets had very little water in the bowl - usually a sure sign that a kiddo was a little too liberal with the TP. But when I flushed it? It flushed just fine. So no, no blockage, just a strange occurrence (Mistake #1).
For some reason yesterday evening before dinner, both kiddos wanted baths. So they both took long, full baths. While running the girl's bathwater upstairs, the girl and I both noticed an "odor" in the bathroom. I blamed it on her, she blamed it on me, and we went on our merry way (Mistake #2). I ran the dishwasher and cooked dinner. Teeth were brushed, toilets were flushed. A lot of water that flowed through this house yesterday evening.
In the quiet that descended after the kiddos went to bed, I noticed a funny sound in my bathroom. It very faintly sounded almost like ... dripping water. But I couldn't see anything obviously wrong, and figured maybe there was a bathtub still draining from Tubfest 2010 (Mistake #3).
As I went to turn on my shower, I looked down and the drain looked funny. Almost like there was a little bit of food that had come out of it at one point (no other description really works there) - peas crossed my mind. WTH??? Then I realized there were a bunch of kid toys in there, crayons of various colors, and a kiddo had been the last one to shower in there, so god only knows what they had been doing in there (Mistake #4).
I went about my merry way, first cleaning the shower because it needed it, then getting myself cleaned up (and noticing that the water seemed to be draining slowly for some reason). After I got out, I realized I could still hear the faint dripping noise, and decided I probably needed to figure it out (this would be the first intelligent decision I made).
I checked around the bathtub - nope. I checked under the sinks - nope. I checked the faucets - nope. While I was troubleshooting, one of the kiddos flushed a toilet upstairs, and the toilet in our bathroom made an ominous bubbling/gurgling sound. Not a good sign at all. After spending several minutes trying to locate the source of the noise, including crawling around on the floor because I could hear the noise better that way, it occurs to me that it sounds like water dripping on plastic. Such as the plastic that is on the floor of the crawlspace immediately under our bathroom. Oh shit.
I hauled my ass down to the crawlspace (which is actually very large in most places, so the word crawlspace is kind of misleading), and as soon as I got down there, I could hear the water hitting the plastic. Bingo. I shined my flashlight around and immediately found the source of the dripping noise. Except...there wasn't just one spot that was leaking. No, there were at least two, and possibly three spots where water was leaking from the subfloor into the crawlspace. This was very not good. Obviously, a water pipe had burst and I needed to shut off the water to the house. Crap, that meant no water for the next morning, but I figured we could survive that. It was better than a flooded crawlspace and enormous water bill.
So I got my wrench and flashlight and went out to the front yard to shut off the water to the house at the meter. Except that while doing so, I notice the meter wasn't turning to show that water was being used. If there was a water leak from incoming water, the meter should be running. It wasn't. Which left me with really only one - very bad - conclusion. Whatever burst pipe that was now leaking into the subflooring and crawlspace (and, as I was to discover later, into the half bath) wasn't an incoming, clean water pipe. It was an outgoing sewage pipe. Shit.
***Update - apparently there was another option. Two water leaks going on at the same time (one from the shower, one from a toilet), combined with a slow moving blockage in the pipes that has apparently cleared. Go figure - I'll take 10 water leaks over a sewage issue any day.***
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