Saturday, March 1, 2008

Sometimes I just want to ask...

What does the world have against us??? We received our tax refund & made several much needed purchases (and some not so needed, but nothing over the top obnoxious). SO what happens Friday??? I am in the kitchen one minute all is well, I grab the remote to turn on some cleaning music & then I hear it. WATER??? Nothing was running, so I go investigate only to find a leaking pipe in the laundry room. Of course, I should have known. We had just gotten the dryer moved in all happy next to the washer & bam we have to move everything out to fix the pipe. The lines froze overnight in the cold & I didn't run the washer just the dryer so it thawed the joint & made a leak, oops am I bad???

So after hauling out all the laundry products on my newly well placed shelf, the shelf & the dryer... Hubby cut out the bad joint and we headed to town for some fittings. While it was all apart we insulated the pipes & filled the wall with more insulation. For anyone who doesn't know our house is 141 years old, so it has issues, BIG ones. Like big gaping holes in the walls that just suck cold air into the house. The laundry room was an addition over a crawl space so the plumbing is all run above the floor & outside of the walls. The dryer vent hole (not cut by us) was HUGE and in the same location as the pipes. Of course we also wrapped the heat exchanger over the furnace which has been effective in lowering the temperature of the basement, maybe we need to rethink that one!!!! My dryer vent is very effective at pulling in air so the metal vent laying on top of the copper lines just wasn't a good plan. Sorry to all the experts but hey, live & learn!

It just figures that the one thing we didn't buy in our Home improvement shopping spree was a soldering kit, so we had to borrow my Dad's. OF course it never dawned on me that we should have just called a plumber. If hubby wasn't capable of piecing in some copper my Dad can. It is nice to have handy people in the family.

But while we were at the store we also bought a new hot water heater, electric to replace the 2 that heat our upstairs water. The apartment's gas hot water heater appears to be one of the first tank heaters ever invented and is very scary when it fires up. I'll be glad to get rid of it. I am impressed at how long it has lasted, usually 10-12 years on a water heater is tops, but this baby is O-L-D! And it will also supply hot water to the front bathroom, which will be part of the Master Bedroom soon.

Looks like we'll be making a scrap yard run sometime in the spring!!!

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