Tuesday, November 21, 2006
The Continuing Misadventures of The Dow
I have a surprise for you. The Wife and I were working on the master bathroom and we ran into a problem. This problem almost flooded our house.
We’re nearing the final touches on our bathroom. My project for Sunday was to install the new shower controls. This is a really simple project. You take off the old stuff and put on the new stuff. 20 minutes, tops.
Of course, I couldn’t get the old stuff off. It was original to the house, of course. So it hadn’t been taken off for almost 40 years. As you can imagine, it wasn’t quite willing to cooperate with me. (Such is the story of my life, really.) After some serious muscle, I was able to get the shower nob off. (I was putting so much torque on the wrench that I thought I was going to bust the pipes behind the wall. That would have been a complete disaster. As opposed to what happened later.)
When I got the nob off, I looked at the new hardware we bought. It didn’t quite match what we just took off. The problem? We had to go back into the wall (that we already tiled) and replace some plumbing. We didn’t feel like dealing with this just yet, so The Wife told me to just stop for the day so we could think about some solutions. No problem.
I headed downstairs and turned the water back on. I heard something odd in the pipes downstairs and headed back upstairs to find out what it was. That’s when I realized that water was POURING into our bathroom at an alarming rate. Apparently, even though my muscle wasn’t strong enough to get all the components out of the plumbing, 8 tons of water was.
I ran downstairs and shut off the water and then The Wife and I spent about 30 minutes cleaning up the water from all over the bathroom. And I do mean ALL OVER.
One of the bathroom projects that we never really finished (because it was so low on the priority list) was caulking around the toilet. Besides, how much water is really going to get under the toilet? Well, if you flood your bathroom, the answer is “a lot.” And in case you forgot, we already had a problem with water leakage in our bathroom. This resulted in a rather large hole in our living room ceiling when the drywall absorbed all the water, then decided it didn’t want any more and collapsed.
So when I was walking down the stairs on Sunday and got a drip of water on my head, you can understand how worried I was. Fortunately, we caught the flooding in time. Also, the leakage wasn’t nearly as great as the first incident (or the Great Plumbing Debacle as we like to call it). So, we just had minor water damage in our front hall. (When we fixed the ceiling last time, we smartly used water-resistant drywall. Thus, the problem shifted from the living room to the front hall.)
Anyway, it looks like we’re going to get a new shower nob that’s similar to our last one. This isn’t quite the look we wanted, but we really don’t feel like going back into the wall to fix the problem with the plumbing. (Especially given my plumbing skills.) By the way, we do realize that we could fix the plumbing by going through a closet wall, but we don’t feel like doing that either. After all, when we bought the house, there was already a hole there and we patched it. To have to fix it again would be rather annoying. Yeah, have I mentioned how much I’m looking forward to this job being over?
We’re nearing the final touches on our bathroom. My project for Sunday was to install the new shower controls. This is a really simple project. You take off the old stuff and put on the new stuff. 20 minutes, tops.
Of course, I couldn’t get the old stuff off. It was original to the house, of course. So it hadn’t been taken off for almost 40 years. As you can imagine, it wasn’t quite willing to cooperate with me. (Such is the story of my life, really.) After some serious muscle, I was able to get the shower nob off. (I was putting so much torque on the wrench that I thought I was going to bust the pipes behind the wall. That would have been a complete disaster. As opposed to what happened later.)
When I got the nob off, I looked at the new hardware we bought. It didn’t quite match what we just took off. The problem? We had to go back into the wall (that we already tiled) and replace some plumbing. We didn’t feel like dealing with this just yet, so The Wife told me to just stop for the day so we could think about some solutions. No problem.
I headed downstairs and turned the water back on. I heard something odd in the pipes downstairs and headed back upstairs to find out what it was. That’s when I realized that water was POURING into our bathroom at an alarming rate. Apparently, even though my muscle wasn’t strong enough to get all the components out of the plumbing, 8 tons of water was.
I ran downstairs and shut off the water and then The Wife and I spent about 30 minutes cleaning up the water from all over the bathroom. And I do mean ALL OVER.
One of the bathroom projects that we never really finished (because it was so low on the priority list) was caulking around the toilet. Besides, how much water is really going to get under the toilet? Well, if you flood your bathroom, the answer is “a lot.” And in case you forgot, we already had a problem with water leakage in our bathroom. This resulted in a rather large hole in our living room ceiling when the drywall absorbed all the water, then decided it didn’t want any more and collapsed.
So when I was walking down the stairs on Sunday and got a drip of water on my head, you can understand how worried I was. Fortunately, we caught the flooding in time. Also, the leakage wasn’t nearly as great as the first incident (or the Great Plumbing Debacle as we like to call it). So, we just had minor water damage in our front hall. (When we fixed the ceiling last time, we smartly used water-resistant drywall. Thus, the problem shifted from the living room to the front hall.)
Anyway, it looks like we’re going to get a new shower nob that’s similar to our last one. This isn’t quite the look we wanted, but we really don’t feel like going back into the wall to fix the problem with the plumbing. (Especially given my plumbing skills.) By the way, we do realize that we could fix the plumbing by going through a closet wall, but we don’t feel like doing that either. After all, when we bought the house, there was already a hole there and we patched it. To have to fix it again would be rather annoying. Yeah, have I mentioned how much I’m looking forward to this job being over?
