Burst Pipes, Sick Kids, Hard Freeze…
I generally don’t like to blog about things of a personal nature if they aren’t related to the farm. However, friends encourage me to do that so that others can get a taste of the chaos that continuously ensues here. So here goes. This week was particularly comical.
I woke up on Saturday morning to a pretty rancid smell wafting through our home. It smelled a little bit like sewage, but not overpowering. I mentioned it to my dad and he said maybe would be a good idea to pop up in the crawlspace and see if there’s anything going on under your house. I didn’t, and as the day progressed, the smell dissipated, and I didn’t think about it again. Sunday morning I woke up and smelled it again but a little bit stronger this time. This was the first morning of the hard freeze. I texted Dad and he was up in no less than 60 seconds, I swear. He’d been out checking on all the animals.
He popped open that panel and lo and behold there was about 2-3 inches of water in the crawlspace. It is the same footprint as the house - large - and it was very wet. Visually he could see water running in rivulets down a pipe around the center of the house. Dad could tell that it was some kind of pipe servicing our second floor. We couldn’t get back there but based on the smell in the house, we assumed the worst. No problem, we have a bathroom in our mud room that has a tiny shower and it was in working order. Inconvenient, but not unbearable. We called the plumber and they recommended a restoration company and scheduled them to come out on Monday to pump out the waste water so the plumber could get in there.
A restoration guy shows up on Monday around noon. He lifts the hatch and we see that the water level has risen - a lot.
Queue Dad again!
The good news is that this kills the theory of it being a waste pipe, and means that it’s a water supply. We had to shut off the water for the entire property.
Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. day so the kids were home from school, it was below freezing outside, and we had a lot of people and animals depending on freshwater (eight people and 40 animals to be exact.)
The restoration company turned out to be quite a joke. From 12 to 4 a guy just wandered around my house bull$#!&ing me about how great he is at saving his customers money and then presents me with an estimate for $2,500. My husband and I own a carpet cleaning company so we know a little bit about restoration. Long story short, we challenged him on the validity of his quote, and he took off.
David ended up running to Home Depot and ended up pumping the water himself, moving the pump around in the crawlspace and getting things in there to dry it out so that the plumber could come the next morning.
Now it’s Tuesday and we’ve been without water for about 24 hours.
We are flushing toilets with buckets of water, showering at the neighbors, house and brushing teeth with cups of water. School is closed because it’s too cold (what?!) so I have both kids home, David working from home again and my daughter is puking every 30 minutes or so because she woke up with the flu. (Try cleaning that up without water.)
The plumbers arrived at noon and identified and fixed our problem in about an hour. They were great. There was a kinked water supply pipe that had been abrading overtime into a larger and larger hole and finally the hole just ruptured. (Funny that our damage had nothing to do with the freeze.) So that mess was mostly cleaned up - we still had some drying out to do, but easy peasy.
Then Wednesday I leave the house with the sick daughter (She had a fever Tuesday night so no school again) and came back about two hours later to the worst sewage smell I have ever experienced. Breathe through the mount so you don’t puke, bad.
DAAAAAADDDD!!!!!
My hero came over again and quickly assessed the situation - our p-trap in the heat pump dried out and it was literally pumping sewer gas out of every vent in my house. Thank goodness for his skill, Dad fixed it in 5 minutes and all was well in the world.
