And then there was a flood

So everything seems to be going well, construction has stopped and the painters are coming... this is good news. Margaret was working late but when Susan arrived home on Thursday night she can tell that the kitchen and bathroom have been painted (and they look great) but something just does not seem right. A quick trip downstairs makes it easy to figure out what the problem is water. It is everywhere!!!!!! Susan soon discovers that the pipe at the back of the house that connects to the tap that shuts off the outside hose, is spraying water like crazy. Out comes the shop vac and the towels and so the cleanup begins. By the time Margaret gets home the water has stopped flowing but it is still at least an inch deep everywhere.

Our brand new mattress and box spring that we bought for the downstairs room is soaked, (had to be tossed), the bottom layer of all our boxes and boxes of kitchen stuff, (moved to the basement to allow for the reno), multiple boxes of Christmas ornaments, carpets, general basement stuff and under everything, is soaked. We worked for hours (I think we stopped at 1 am) and sucked up what we could until we could no longer bend over. The ruined stuff went outside, the wet stuff was moved to the top of things to dry out, carpets were cut into pieces to make them light enough to carry outside and fans were turned on in an effort to dry the rest out.

5 days later it is still wet downstairs but it is getting better. Hopefully we won't grow our own crop of fungus in the walls.

We did discover what happened. It seems that when the painters finished up the painting they went out side and used the hose to cleanup the brushes. What they didn't do is turn off the hose at the wall. All they did was release the lever on the hose itself. The pressure built up backwards and where the pipe was weak inside the house, (old plumbing after all), it burst.

Now we need to add "upgrade the plumbing" to the budget.

All we can think is it could have been worse. If this had happened last weekend we would have been away and it would have run the whole time we were away.