Every single time something is done to my house, I go back to my list to draw a line through that task. Unfortunately, I have had some mishaps that were unexpected and therefor not on the list. How am I supposed to have a false sense of accomplishment if I can't draw a line through an item on a piece of paper?
On Tuesday I had the great fortune to arrive home to a pipe spraying water all over my outside patio. The PVC simply got to a point where it was tired of being a pipe and instead wanted to pursue a career as a Niagara Falls impersonator. Thankfully I didn't have to clean up the water because this particular problem happened outside...no damaged floors, no wet carpet, no row, row, row my boat inside the house.
Just like there is a thin line between love and hate, there is also a thin line between something covered by home warranty and something not covered by home warranty. Unfortunately, the home warranty does not cover outside pipes. After a day and a half of living without water in the house, Brian the Wonder Plumber came and fixed everything. New pipe, new elbow joint, new purple primer and glue, new lease on life. Needless to say, his repair worked a lot better than my 9:30 pm repair job from Tuesday night involving duct tape, glue, and lots of cursing.
After 30 minutes or so, I leave for work and decide to admire, once again, my new pipe. That's when I see the weeping water flowing down the outside of the wall. What? Weeping? AARRRGGGGGG. For a few minutes the wall and I sat together to weep. We talked, we wept, we wept some more. So, not only did the PVC fail, there was also some sort of leak inside the wall.
I placed another frantic call to Brian, plumber to the gods, and he skedaddled right back to the house, ripped a hole in the wall, and said, "Compression fittings. Stupid compression fittings." It seems the old owners were cheap and lazy and decided to connect their interior copper pipes with compression fittings instead of soldering the pipes together. In the plumbing world, this is evidently known as "a leak waiting to happen".
The beauty of it all, however, is that home warranty does cover pipes in the wall, even though they are only a few short inches away from pipes outside the wall. I got a double dose of plumber love for half the price. Another bonus...home warranty will pay to fix the hole in my wall. In the interim, if anyone asks I am going to say I punched that hole in the wall during my kung fu practice.
Tip of the day: When you are going out of town, turn your water off at the meter. If I hadn't been home when the pipe exploded, I would have flooded the entire county.
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