Joys in home ownership

So, there are quite a few aspects of owning your own home that they don't exactly cover in the brochure, that when the past few months have had you thinking "Jesus, equity isn't worth this", you feel obligated to share.

First and foremost. I come home from Christmas/New Year's break, sans my lost Driver's license (thanking my lucky stars that I even made it home at all, since they were just about to not let me through the Houston airport), when I find in my mailbox a water bill for $500. Past the "holy shit", I'm thinking, "this isn't right; there's got to be a mistake. But then I see that while I was on the plane, someone from the city left me a message, saying that my water meter was abnormally high and that the ground in front of my house was damp, even when it hadn't been raining. Well, shit. That's not good. By the time I made it home it was too late to call anyone to do anything about it, so armed with my trusty crescent wrench, I head out to the meter so as not to exacerbate the problem. The water shut off, I take my final night's piss in the bushes in my backyard (thankfully fenced in with a privacy fence), and go to bed.

The next day I call a plumber, but he can't make it in until the day after, so I am forced to wait. I was of course unable to take a shower with my water off, and went into work smelling a little rank. The next day, nice and early in the morning, the plumber arrives and within a couple of hours, diagnoses and fixes the leak, which was in the connector that hooks the pvc coming out of the meter into the copper going into my house. Of course. As any electrical engineer can tell you, it's always the damn connectors that fail. That adventure set me back $210, but I was happy to pay, as the ease with which this dude had sniffed out my leak was truly impressive

So. Everything seems fine, I take my shower and go into work for the afternoon, coming back and not noticing anything amiss until it's time for bed, I go to get a last glass of water, and in the area that hooks my kitchen to my garage, I notice that there's some standing water. Shit! I immediately look around to begin diagnosing the problem.

The short hall between my kitchen and my garage has a pantry on the left. This pantry shares its right-hand wall with the garage, and its back wall with the alcove off of my garage that houses my furnace and water heater. And it appears to be the pantry that has flooded. Oh, shit. I know what happened here. Sure enough, I open the door to examine my water heater, and it's leaking. A pretty serious leak, from the top. I had known for a while that my water heater was starting to fail, but procrastinated a bit too much. My working hypothesis (unfortunately impossible to test) is that when the leak in my main waterpipe was fixed, the requisite increase in pressure was what led the water heater to fail. And of course, if the water heater breaks, there's a drain that's supposed to capture the leaked water and deposit it outside the house, to prevent flooding, but that wasn't working either, at least not 100%, because there was a hole rusted through the pan that the water heater was sitting in.

So, it was too late to do anything about it, and I knew that you were supposed to be able to turn your water heater off for an occasion just as this. One of the pipes leading into the water heater had a valve on it, sure enough, but operating this valve seemed to do exactly nothing to fix the leak. I figured the valve must be shot, but then decided to go turn on a hot water faucet in my house with the valve shut. No hot water came out, though cold water came out just fine. Hmm. Going back to the water heater, I put my hand on the two pipes and noticed that the pipe with the valve on it was warm, while the other was icy cold. Crap! The shut-off valve was on my hot water pipe! Fat lot of good that does me. Thus, armed once again with my trusty crescent wrench, I turned off the water at my meter. You'd be surprised how difficult it can be to do that, but I managed to manage.

The next day I called the same plumber I called before, but he was busy for several days and said that he really pretty much specialized in foundation leaks anyway, so he referred me to another plumber, who I called and described the problem to. He agreed that my water heater was shot ("Yea, dat suckah's shawt!") but expressed perplexion when I told him of my scenario with the water valves ("Yah valve is on yah hawt wahter pipe? Dat ain't right!") Nevertheless, he agreed to come in the next day, and install a new water heater for me, which he would provide. I had him quote a price, and he said that it would be just over $400 for the new heater and installation, which seemed reasonable. He came in the next day and got everything installed. He did a very good job - it turned out that the valve wasn't on the wrong pipe per se, just that my wall was plumbed backwards, with the cold water pipe coming in off the wall in the spot where the hot water pipe usually is, and vice versa. This meant that my water heater had been siphoning hot water off of the *bottom* of my water heater, which is not how it's supposed to work, since pulling the hot water off the top is more energy-efficient (since hot water, like hot air, rises). Who knows how much in unnecessary electricity that cost me over the past couple of years?

I gladly payed the $420 that it turned out to be, and realized with some horror that I had spent well over $1000 , all on plumbing-related expenses, in the course of a week. Luckily, not long after was my split-with-2nd in the $5+R PLO tournament, which netted me over $900. Great, I though, I just paid for my plumbing.

Flash forward to last night. All had been right in the world of my plumbing until I'm going to take my last piss before bed at around 11:30. I notice, then, with some horror, that my bathtub is maybe a third-full of brownish-yellow "water". Oh, you have got to be kidding me! What the fuck is this? I go to my master bathroom and see that my garden tub also has water in it, and that even the shower in there has some standing water. Shit! Oh, that's just nasty. Suddenly every low-standing area in my house with a sewer drain has backed up with sewage. Although I have essentially no sense of smell, and can tell from my eyes and my taste buds that the smell must be just totally pungent. I open up every window that I can, turn on every ceiling fan in the house, and resolve to take care of the problem tomorrow.

Flash forward to this morning. I wake up and immediately go to check on my tubs. But before I can even make it to the bathroom, I step on what feels like wet, squishy carpet. Oh, you are KIDDING me! After the immediate panicking, and realizing that, no, it's not all over the house, just in the area around my master bathroom, I finally get to checking the tubs, which are now empty. So I figure that some time during the night, whatever was plugging up my main sewer pipe (which is what it had to have been; everything I put down a drain or flushed down the toilet was thus getting backed up into my lowest-altitude drains to an equalizing pressure) got itself cleared up, but that my garden tub and regular tub drained considerably faster than my shower, due to the increased volume of water there. Because my shower has an entrance that's low to the ground, it must have spilled over and left my carpet now squishy with sewage water.

So now, I'm taking a break from the midst of a fairly massive clean-up job. I bought a little handheld carpet cleaner for the time being (although I'm thinking I may have to eventually bring in the bigger artillery for this one, as well as a nice 14" floor-level high-speed fan to help dry things. I have every back window to my house open, every fan on, with the hopes of airing the place out, and I'm only hoping that the carpet, after I'm done cleaning it out, isn't left with an ever-present piss smell. The handheld did some of it, but I'm thinking I need to give it the shampoo before I'm through.

I took the morning off work and my boss called me before I called him, because I'm supposed to be on shifts. He didn't seem too pleased as it sounded like he needed me, so I told him I'd be in for the afternoon. Right now I'm listening to my new fan attempt to blow-dry my carpet, while a bunch of my clothes, which had been lying on the floor in the offending area and thusly became piss-stained, to get out of the dryer.

I take some solace in the fact that most of the water plugged up in my system had to have been actual water, from my shower that morning, from the dishwasher, and that, not to be too crude, it was yellowish and not brownish. Whatever was fouling up the water had to have been very dilute, and thus my efforts to clean it up should hopefully prove successful.

But still, they don't tell you about having to deal with piss-stained carpet when they give you the brochures advocating all the benefits of home ownership.