This old house
 

No, not the TV show, MY old house!

Bit me on the tush again today.

Wife asks me to replace the handles on the outside faucets so she can put the hose in the backyard. The handles are missing. Sounds simple enough, right? $1.49 each at Home Despot. A screw or two from my jar. A few seconds each with a screwdriver and presto! Done! Right?

Nope

Turns out that the faucet in the backyard has a broken stem from being hit with the car. I didn't know this right away, of course. So I install the new handle, turn on the water (which I hadn't bothered to turn off since I wouldn't be dicking with the line) and I get a shot of water straight to my face. I curse eloquently and turn it off again. Now I have to replace the whole valve. I have what looks to be a good spare in my toolbox so I proceed to follow the line back and turn off the water to that line.

Outside again, I attempt to remove the old valve. Manage to bend the line a little before I figure out that it's stuck on there. Grr! Out comes the blowtorch and a minute of heating later, the valve begins turning. OK, so far so good. I keep turning until BAM! The valve shoots off under my car and the water comes out in a rush. And the spare valve is too small, of course. Now I have a torrent of water spraying my (dirt) yard. The shutoff valve...didn't. I curse like an angry Spanish sailor. Next step I suppose is to look for another shutoff in case I stupidly turned off the wrong one. Nope. I'm not that dumb. No other shutoffs there. Perhaps walled up behind our nice, plywood, featureless walls. But not accessible and I need that water off NOW!.

I head, dripping, back out again to turn the water off at the main line. Ooops! Forgot that I had dug out the dirt from in front of my garage so the new doors would open. Now I have a small lake forming there, flooding my garage. Which has my power tools on the floor just inside the door, boxes and boxes of stuff, and my personal favorite, three bags of Redi-Mix (on the floor of course) waiting for me to repair the fencing. CRAP!

I get out my push broom and start sweeping the water out as fast as it's shooting in. This is not going to be one of my more auspicious projects, I can tell. I take a moment to tell the wife to call whatever plumber she can get hold of in the late afternoon hours to come out and shut off the water and fix the damn (expletive deleted, too sharp for sensitive ears) thing.

Fortunately, it only took a few minutes for a plumber to arrive and turn off the water to the house and allowing me to get ahead of the flooding and save my tools if not the boxes and cement.

They don't have the right valve so they simply install a shutoff ball-valve so I can turn off the flood and return the house water service. Now I have to go back out and buy new valves (I bet the others are in a similar state) to replace the handles. (remember that was the original idea?)

Sigh!

Another fun day fixing up an old house and more laundry for the wife and more mopping for me (I tracked mud into the house).

No pix as I didn't take the time for it.

I'll get some tomorrow after I repair the damage and hopefully the water recedes.

Oh, that sounds so much like my experience with plumbing! I hate working on plumbing. In my experience with this place, all the plumbing is so old that if you work on one part of it, problems with other parts start popping up. I'm fairly convinced that I just need to replace all the plumbing in this old house at once.

Plumbing is unique in that when you have the knowledge, and the proper tools, and the right parts... it's still a pain in the ass. The other trades have an intrinsic reward of making things cooler... plumbing is all about getting it back to where it was, working again. :right:

OK, got it fixed.

The damage isn't too bad, considering. A few boxes got wet, contents not critical. A boxful of the wife's papers got soaked, value not determined. A roll of shop towels seems to have soaked up all the moisture...ruined. And a box of envelopes are destroyed. Other than that and a really musty smell, no major damage noted.

Yard slowly drying out, Redi-Mix needs to be shoveled into a trash bag for disposal. As soon as I find the shovel, buried in garage somewhere...

You write well when you're flustered. :)


really though,
I am sorry it happened and you described it so well! The only thing more frustrating than a leaking faucet is a gushing faucet.

Old houses have more character, but they're also a lot of pain. Our water heater started leaking last summer. That's sort of like your situation, but in slow motion. :D

I am so done with character. I would gladly trade it for new plumbing and an association fee at this point.

Oh no, say it ain't so. :mg:
I'll accept a new house, doesn't even have to be a large lot, but I can't see your tribe trapped in one of those conform-or-die associations. :headshake

Meh, I'd rather conform than mow the lawn.

That's what kids are for.

What's this about not having to mow the lawn? We have an HOA with annual dues, and we still have to mow our own lawn. (Well, really we pay some nice Mexican men to do it...)

HOAs are un-american and pure evil. You deserve your misery.

If the HOA fees didn't cover lawn care and exterior maintenance I wouldn't be interested in living there.
I remember being at my dads one day and someone came by and painted his garage door. I fell in love...

Nah, the HOA fees cover other stuff, like 5 playgrounds within a 1-mile radius, 3 pools within a 5-mile radius that are only available to residents (& their guests) including one that's heated and open all winter, a hiking trail with a duck pond, movie nights in the park once a month in the warm seasons, and a community center with a variety of informal classes, sports teams, and a moderately-sized fitness center. Use of the pools is so popular that they're debating whether to build a fourth one indoors.

Then again, other than the playgrounds, we can't really use any of that stuff ourselves, so maybe it would be better if they mowed our lawn instead after all... :lol:

That's what Katrina is for. A simple flood and all those other problems no longer exist.

Your mistake - your pipe was not big enough.