Disaster

I'm playing catch up right now. I've been meaning to sit down and do this for awhile now, but every time I do, I end up just reading other blogs and then when I remember, the kids are demanding my attention. Yeah, I have a lot of excuses, but mainly, I'm just lazy and usually want to go to bed when I have a minute at the end of the day. Anyway, over a month ago, we had a bit of a problem with our main water line to the house. Well, I guess you could say it burst. The house we live in is almost a hundred years old, and the water line was about 50. It had had enough, I guess, and decided it was done. Thankfully, we are renting and it was the owner's responsibility to fix, so all we had to do was find a place to stay for several days. At first, I thought it would be fixed by the next day, so I figured we'd just stay here and suffer through not having any water. Apparently, I don't know anything about plumbing, though, and it took all weekend, plus a day. Justin's sister read about it on Facebook and immediately called me to invite us to stay at her house. They have a son on a mission, so his bedroom of course is free. I'm still so grateful for her offer, considering I had grossly misjudged the amount of time the water would be out. The plumber did say that we could probably have gotten a water key from the city to turn the water on whenever we needed it, but umm, no thanks. Walking outside to turn it on and having more water go down into the cellar was not too exciting a prospect. So, we stayed with family for 4 nights and got back into our house on Monday. I am happy it's fixed, but now we have a mud pit for a driveway because it was only gravel before and now the gravel is gone. But once again, happy that we are renting and didn't have to pay for the new pipeline.

This is when I realized there was a problem. I went outside to throw something away and found the driveway spouting water and running down my sidewalk.

The water pooling outside the cellar and then flowing down the stairs.

The city had to come and dig in the snow and ice to find the water shut off valve, and then they left the rest up to us. It took several hours to finally get a hold of our landlord, and he couldn't get a plumber out till the next day. Fun experience. Glad it's over.