Now I Know

Growing up, I wondered why my dad always shut the water off to the house when we left town for Thanksgiving and Christmas trips. Last week, when our main water line froze, my mom told me they had a pipe freeze and burst, flooding the basement, the first winter after purchasing my childhood home.

Once bitten, twice shy. No more flooding for my dad!

I think we may be doing the same thing if we hear of another Deep Freeze coming to North Texas.

I don’t have any drama-filled action photos of the Great Hayley House Pipe Burst, because I lost my head completely in the chaos and was fairly useless. Give me blood and guts any day – no problems. But gushing water or strange codes flashing on the oven and I’m worse than worthless.

Seriously – I was squealing, running around for tools and, yes {hanging head in shame} texting people who weren’t even in the same state, let alone the same town, about the situation.

Sigh.

Thank heavens we have The Boy, who can stay calm in cases of House Crisis. We also have Good Friend Richard, who saved the day with the proper tools to shut off our water at the meter.

The list of Thank Heavens really is quite long, so I’ll sum up:

Thank Heavens The Boy keeps his head – and can find his shoes. (Unlike his wife.)

Thank Heavens that the geyser was in the garage and happened while we were home to deal with it. We’re hoping to say Thank Heavens that it’s only this little bit of pipe that needs replacing, but that’s still to be determined.

Thank Heavens the Hayley House garage has sufficient slope for the flood to flow to the alley. I hate using push squeegees. I’m also grateful that we had enough common sense to put waterproof items on bottom shelves and cardboard boxes high up – nothing was damaged. And now (thanks to the geyser) we don’t have to wash the truck, either!

Again, Thank Heavens we were home and able to get the water shut off quickly, before the water could run back into the house through {previously undiscovered} unsealed portions of our garage wall. The amount of mopping we had to do in the laundry room and master bathroom was quite minimal.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Thank Heavens for Good Friend Richard who was a super hero for coming over to help us at a moments notice and to our excellent contractor, Don, who brought a crew around to work on the house today. (Don did all of our renovation work before we moved into the house last spring).

It was pretty exciting to go from three days of no running water to nothing but running water for 20 very hectic minutes.

I plan to take a well-deserved long, hot bath tonight.

Summary of Lessons Learned:

• We now know where our water meter shut off is located.
• We now know how to shut off our water at the water meter.
• We need to buy a water meter key and shut off tool.
• When previous evidence of stupid home improvement items abounds, we should assume the previous owners also have done something stupid to the plumbing.