Weekend Disaster!

For those of you who don’t know, Jeff is in Norway right now interviewing for a fellowship. He left early Sunday morning and will return late Wednesday night. If he gets the fellowship we will have to decide if it’s worth it for us to move to Norway for a few years so that he can get his PHD. I’ll update on what’s going on with that as soon as I know what’s going on with that.
The real story I wanted to share is what happened yesterday after he left. Whenever Jeffery is out of the house on a weekend I see it as a great opportunity for myself to get some real house cleaning done. Not just the usual tidy up and try to make it look presentable but the get down and dirty cleaning. So my plan yesterday was to clean my main floor for however long it took to get it really really clean. About halfway through my project I opened up the door to my downstairs bathroom to mop the floor (the bathroom that’s been in the process of getting remodeled for almost a year) and noticed a drip of water hitting my toilet. I looked up and the entire ceiling was bowing down. I rushed to get a bucket, cut a whole in the sheet rock and a solid stream of water gushed out. This is when I panicked. Jeff is gone, water cascading through the ceiling, what do you do?! I called my Dad. He walked me through where to look for the main water shut off valve, which took me like five minutes to find and then told me to call a plumber. Just what everyone wants, to have to make an emergency call to a plumber! They charge ridiculous rates when it’s not a Sunday night. After three calls to three different plumbing places and a little more panicking, I finally found one that had an emergency plumber on duty. About an hour after I called a really nice older man who owns the plumbing company I called showed up. He had to rip the ceiling out of the bathroom and by rip I mean cut and saw through the sheetrock and lathe and plaster that was above the sheetrock. Luckily he had a tarp down to catch all of the gunk that poured out of the ceiling. Come to find out, our upstairs sink has had a slow leak and the drain pipe (which was 100 year old lead) had rusted through. I’m guessing the slow leak had been pooling up above my ceiling for a couple of days before it finally busted through. Fun stuff I tell you. So $450 later I have a fixed drain, or at least he’s at the house right now fixing it. Plus, my bathroom project has been set back probably another year! I guess in a way it’s great that we’ve been so slow to get that project done since we hadn’t put up the crown molding yet. I think I’d have cried if we would have had to take that down too.
When Jeff gets back I plan on letting him know that’s he’s never allowed to travel again! Geez like I ever thought I needed to know the shut of valve to our water line’s location. Am I the stereotypical woman or what?! Although I am proud of myself that I watched my Dad deal with leaks enough to know that I needed to cut a hole in the ceiling sheet rock to let the water through, so I get points for that right. Also when Jeff gets back I’m having him walk me through our home to locate any other “locations” to important devices. I’ll try to get a picture up of the damage. Hope everyone else had disaster free weekends!