Down the drain...

I am SO lost without my Paint Shop Pro and my high-speed Internet connection. The withdrawal has produced almost flu-like symptoms.

Anyway, it took some doing, but I was finally able to subdue my evil hot water heater. Of course, getting someone out to the house to replace an oil-fired hot water heater on a Sunday was an interesting exercise. I've always thought that plumbers, in general, were an ill-tempered bunch. But I finally found a way to make them laugh. Hysterically.

So the only thing I could do was subdue the beast, and schedule a replacement for mid-week. Since there are folks staying at the house while we're gone, it couldn't very well wait until we returned. But here was a real surprise - the hot water heater was installed without a shutoff valve! That's such a surprise because, you know, everything else in our house was constructed with such care and forethought.

In order to stop the onslaught of water, the only thing I could do was shut off the main water supply - obviously this was no solution for those folks staying at the house. So I had to do my own emergency plumbing operation to get a shut-off valve installed. This involved cutting out a section of pipe and soldering in a new valve.




So now I could shut off the water heater and leave the main water supply on. Great. Beckett dumped a to-do list a mile long on my lap, and now, after several trips to the hardware store and an hour or so of work, I could finally start on it.

First, the two inches of standing water. See, here's the problem with that. There's this drain in the floor in the middle of my basement that should have prevented this whole mess. But of course, it wasn't working - since the previous owners had the care and forethought to cover it with glue-on tile, layered over with glue-on carpet. After a couple hours work with hammer and chisel, I'd exposed the floor drain. Which was filled with flooring glue.

To make a long story short, after a heroic effort, I decided to call the plumbers back to see if they could at least come out and clear the drain. This might have worked, except they were still laughing too hard to talk. Humorous bunch, those plumbers. So I bought a sump-pump and got the water out of the basement.

Having just installed wall-to-wall carpet, it would have been very easy to get discouraged. But I couldn't stop thinking of Katrina's victims, still trying to recover. Things didn't seem so bad after that. It will all wait 'til I get home.

...to be continued.