Waterless

We're "waterless" in this house tonight, at least temporarily. Not a pleasant situation to be in when you've just spent 7 non-consecutive hours* of the day in the car traveling plus 4 hours house-hunting and all you want is to take a warm shower to relax. But you have, instead, to empty the contents of the under the sink kitchen cabinet to investigate a mysterious leak and to remove a thoroughly soaked ceiling panel in the basement which, fortunately, didn't drip into the precious photo albums stored directly below.

This is all great, though, compared to what could have been. Earlier today, while we were a couple of states South, the appraisal of this house took place. Can you imagine if the kitchen had been filled with water when the buyer's agent and the appraiser got here? Everything was or seemed dry and it was only later, when the agent came back for the termite inspection (no termites, only carpenter ants -- remind me to post about the inspection results tomorrow, OK?) that she noticed water in the basement ceiling panel. She called our agent, Roberta, but we had already been contacted about the issue by my parents-in-law, who drove down from Montreal today and had entered the house at 1:30 pm and noticed the water on the kitchen floor. K instructed his dad to shut down the water main, so things were under control.

Can you imagine how disastrous it could have been but wasn't? It's still a tremendous hassle. The in-laws had to turn the water back on so they could take showers this evening and we couldn't sleep in Maryland and drive back tomorrow as we'd planned because we needed to take care of this. Sigh.

I think I know what might have caused the (very old) pipe to crack. When K installed the sprayer for the new sink -- a feature I use multiple times everyday to wash dishes, fill the water filter and fill pots for cooking -- he didn't realize that the hose got stuck to one of the pipe valves when it was pulled out. I'd already warned him of the problem and asked him to fix it because every time I used the sprayer, I tugged hard on that pipe. I remember clearly the last time I did it on Saturday night when I filled the water filter. I hope the pipe hadn't been leaking since that night, but apparently it started this morning (or got worse).

K put some type of epoxy adhesive that he found in his toolbox and we'll see if that will temporarily stop the leak and allow us at least to be able to shower, flush toilets and wash some dishes tomorrow morning before we can get a plumber to come over. I hope this small problems gets solved soon.

Aren't our lives just so unpredictably exciting? And I don't even know if I can/will tell you what else is going on right now. We'll see about that later. And now I have to sleep because it's really late or, early...

*2h in the morning, 2h early evening, 3h driving back home at night.