Interesting Times

It's been a tad nippy, especially for Georgia, here lately, including one nightly temperature that went down to 8ºF (something like -10 with the wind chill). James and I pretty much ignored it. It was cold, but we just bundled up, and despite the evident shortcuts the builders took with our house, cold's never bothered it much, not even the plumbing. The furnace just runs more.

Friday night James dropped the laundry basket off in the laundry room and we set out to IHOP for supper. We had coupons, so we had a leisurely steak dinner and then came home.

I walked through the den and up the short hall to the short stairway to the kitchen to let Willow out. I did notice that the carpet in the hall seemed uncommonly soft. James was already taking his shoes off--and gave a yell because his foot was wet.

I turned on the hall light to find about 12 feet of carpet (the entire hall and about two feet into the den) sopping wet and could see water in the downstairs bathroom. I squelched on the hall to find the laundry room floor shiny with about half an inch of water and a sound like water running. Note: I had not done something stupid like start the washer before we left.

James lost a few minutes fumbling around for a flashlight and pulling on his shoes. Unable to find anything in the laundry room, he realized the culprit had to be the outside water faucet to the back yard. He ran back into the yard and sure enough water was pouring from around the spigot, down the yard, under the shed, and toward the gate to the yard. It was evidently also seeping through the cinderblock wall into the laundry room, which is right behind the spigot.

Since the dimwit who built the house (the same demented idiot who also put the wallpaper smack on the drywall without priming it first and who installed an outside electrical plug in the back of the house but not the front) had neglected to install a shutoff valve for this faucet, we had no choice but to shut down the entire main water supply. (I gave our home maintenance folks an emergency call and never did get a call from them back; needless to say I was a bit ticked when I did get in touch with them. As I suspected, they'd been inundated with broken frozen pipes calls and we ended up at the end of a very long queue: no repair until Monday morning. They did promise to fit us in if there was a cancellation on Saturday; needless to say there wasn't.)

I gave a frantic call to a friend I thought might have a Wet/Dry shop vac; they didn't but another friend did and we gratefully accepted the loan. It's a useful animal to have around the home anyway, so while I waited for the friend to bring his over, James ran out to Home Depot and bought a 9-gallon unit. I used the smaller loaner until he came, but it could have never coped with the amount of water in that carpet. The moment the water was shut off the laundry room floor and bathroom floor began to dry, but we spent the rest of the evening continually running the nozzle of that shop vac over and over that 12 feet of carpet. James estimates we got anywhere from eleven to thirteen gallons out of it.

By bedtime it no longer squelched, but was still wet. We left some fairly high wattage lightbulbs going in the hall, the bathroom, and the laundry room to dry things out, and on Saturday I ran the vac over the carpet a couple more times. It only got out about a pint of water; that was the end of the vac usefulness. Then I put down our space heater teamed with our small fan, aimed right down the 12 foot length. This in combination with the lights being left on and the usual dryness in the house dried the remainder of the carpet, amazingly, in about nine hours. (I still have the fan on it.)

Saturday I also cleaned out the floor in the laundry room; thankfully we didn't lose much except a box James had stored a gift in. We just put the gift out; it had been packed away since we were in the apartment!

The rest of the weekend was an adventure of living without water. In the most bizarre way, Osama bin Laden indirectly "saved" us. Last December, when the maniac was rattling his saber about launching more terror attacks during the holiday season, I started rinsing out gallon jugs from the skim milk and filling them with filtered water. We had fifteen or twenty of the things, plus some two liters of water, stored in our downstairs shower, which we usually don't use. We used this water to wash hands, take pills, and flush the toilet.

As hard as it was going without a shower, the worst part was actually the toilets. Of course we "let things rest" until it needed flushing due to paper, and by that time it was pretty "high." Don't know how our pioneer ancestors coped with outhouses at all!

I have to be home for the plumber tomorrow, then have to wash all the clothes I couldn't wash Friday night and run the dishwasher, but James has to go to work as he's still training at the new job. Thus he had to have a shower. A friend offered to accomodate both of us, so we spent this evening getting clean again and refilling the water jugs.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:59:00 PM

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