I love owning a home that is 168 years old... I really do. I enjoy the history that we have found about the families that once lived here. And I love that over the coming years, we will be able to restore the house and add our own history to it. But, there are a couple things I do not like about an old house...
1. I am not Norm Abram (TOH)
2. There are no straight corners in the entire house!
3. When you need to fix something, it always takes a lot more time to get to the problem than it does to actually fix it.
4. Everything is pieced together and never the same material throughout (especially plumbing).
5. When one things breaks, you find that as you take it apart... that it was broken many times before, never fixed the right way and now a complete mess and will cost much more to fix than first anticipated.
So, what is my point?
I put the kids to bed this evening and went downstairs to return a phonecall. As I was on the phone, I was standing in the living room and I heard dripping water... a lot of dripping water. I turned around and by the door to the office, there was a waterfall flowing from the ceiling. I quickly grabbed towels and went upstairs to the bathroom. There was water completely saturating the floor and a large pool forming around the toilet. I tried shutting the water off, but when I turned the shut-off valve, it started flowing from down by that valve. Uh... so, I closed the shut-off valve half way to slow the toilet fill-up as much as I could. I went downstairs to grab the Plumbing book from Home Depot and sat at the computer trying to figure out my best plan of action. I knew that the valve in the back of the toilet was shot as well, but wasn't sure how to get it all to stop flooding, dripping and making a mess. I couldn't figure it out so I called our neighbor. His name is Bob - to me and my family, he is 'Bob the Builder'. He generously came up here to help me get all the water turned off to upstairs and try and figure out the problem(s).
Well... we still heard water flowing, very actively, I might add. But there wasn't any water flowing through the walls, floors or in the basement. And the well wasn't drawing water either. Stumped. It really sounded like a pipe burst and was flowing into the wall behind the toilet. Well, after walking around the house, we went back upstairs. We eventually figured out that the valve that shuts the water off was not sealing itself properly. So, it might appear to be off, but it wasn't. It was allowing a little bit of water to continue flowing into the toilet. I know, you plumbers out there are thinking did you check that? We did and there weren't even any ripples in the water in the bowl or the back to suggest water was flowing in. That is the miniscule amount that was still leaking in. So, why did the water flow sound so loud and in great quantity?
Well, I am happy we stopped the flooding. And the good news is, I don't have to break a wall to figure out the piping sytem. The bad news is we have to replace the pump valve and the shut-off valve (and hopefully, it is just a washer in the shut-off valve).
Back to my list... 1. I wish I had more knowledge about fixing the house (like Norm). 2. It didn't matter about straight corners in this instance. 3. It definitely took more time to figure out what the problem was than it will take to actually replace the valves. 4. Since the original construction was done, it has been patched up many times and not all of the repairs were necessarily the best way to do it...the repairs just fixed the problem 'for now'. 5. And lastly, it wasn't just one valve... it ended up being 2.
I am thankful for these problems. They are small in the whole scheme of things and are funny at times. There's no point losing sleep over it (at one point in my life, I might have). I'm thankful that we have great neighbors. God put em' there for a reason. And we have learned so much since we bought this old farmhouse. I'll take it broken, pieced together and loved by many. And most important, it's ours. I love old houses!
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