A Leaky Pipe

This was a first for these homeowners. Friday night as I was tucking Dude into bed, I noticed he had a wet spot next to his curtains. I immediately wrote it off to a wayward cup of water. The next day I was at my parent's house to see my sister Megan and her children who were paying their Christmas wishes.

At some point during the visit, I got a call from Matthew asking if I had spilled something in Dude's room, when I told him I hadn't he decided to pull up the carpet to investigate. At that, I rushed home to "help". 

Cutting a hole in our floorboard may not have been our wisest homeowner choice, but when no one knows what they are doing, and there may be the risk of more serious unknown damage, I guess you do crazy things. The top of the floor board was sopping wet but underneath, including the insulation was dry. Matthew, manfully, climbed down into the crawl space under our house, found his way through the maze to Dude's room to further assess the situation and still came up with no plausible causes for the wet spot.

After that we ripped up more carpet and realized that the wet spot was emanating from the corner of Dude's room. At that point we decided that it was most likely a burst pipe from our most recent deep freeze that had thawed out on Friday. Being Christmas Eve, we opted not to turn off the water to our whole house for Christmas, but turned on all the fans we have in our house and prayed that the situation didn't get worse over the weekend.

Monday morning, we called a plumber who quickly came out, confirmed our suspicion and easily fixed our problem. We are a bit poorer financially for the double mistake of not putting insulators on our outdoor faucets and tearing a hole in our carpet/floor-board, but we are so much wiser for our experience. I don't know if Matthew considers it a fair trade, but I am so grateful for home-owner's insurance, I am grateful for a sweet girl who shared her room with her brother over Christmas break and a son who didn't complain for being exiled from his bedroom while his room got fixed. I am grateful we were able to get the pipe and floor fixed and new carpet installed before Dude and Luca went back to school after Christmas break, and I'm grateful that because of our costly mistake we then had a warm space for Matthew to work on his desk. More on that later.

Merry Christmas Eve from the Marlers!!