A few weeks ago, we were subject to the annoying sound of a dripping faucet in the tub. After dinner David carried his toolbox into the bathroom to see what he could do. After trying to tighten the faucet with a wrench, the small drip turned into a 1/4 full stream problem. This is when I got involved, not that I was much help. I tried to find the answer to our plumbing problem online while David searched for the main water valve. He eventually thought to look in the House inspection packet where he found that the shut off valve is located in the crawl space in the Southeast corner of our house. Great! I felt so bad that he had to crawl under there. But, he suited up and courageously descended into our dungeon (see picture above). He didn't bring his cell phone the 1st time down, so I yelled every 15 seconds to make sure he was still alive. He did find the valve and turned it off. We made a trip to wal-mart to look for the parts the internet said we would need. A very kind friend came over to help us get the valve stem off. We couldn't do it with the tools we had. After all our unsuccessful efforts, we decided to call a plumber who said he could come in the morning. We left our water off and spent the night at David's parent's. Another fun detail about the night is that I was planning to study for my nursing final. I ended up studying for 30 minutes that night. I studied for 1.5 hours the next morning. The good thing is, I don't think I would have done any better on the final if I had studied like I had planned.
So, the plumber came in the morning. He spent 5 minutes in our house and was done. David and I headed to Home Depot after he came home from work. Fortunately, we got the right part. After putting things back together, David went back down into the dungeon to turn the water on. Our tub no longer leaked. However, David discovered a more serious problem while he was in the crawl space- a small leak in the water main right below the valve! We called our plumber right away. He said that shutting off the water to fix the tub caused the pressure to build up in the pipe and then find the weak spot when we turned the water on again. Apparently, the risk of flooding isn't major. We are currently living above saturated ground. He is coming to fix it on Wednesday. They're going to dig and replace the whole main line, which will be an expensive home improvement.
What we have learned:
1) don't attempt plumbing projects without any knowledge of plumbing
2) the value of a saving's account
3) we must be living right- The old pipe was bound to leak sometime and our little tub faucet leak helped us find it. This could have been a huge disaster.
