I had an interesting morning today.
Since it was Friday night yesterday and we have our days off on Saturdays, we stayed up late watching films and the like and I slept on one of the sofas, with Tim on the other and Dusty on the floor. Kevin had actually slept over at the boys’ house but was already here when I woke up at about 9. After eating breakfast I headed over to ours to get some fresh clothes before I showered, but as I approached the front door I could hear dripping in the furnace room below the house. Stepping to the right I walked in down the steps to discover water spraying from one of the pipes and the floor already an inch or two deep. “Kevin!” I shouted, knowing he was at the furnace in the other house, running back – I don’t know how water pipes worked. I quickly explained what I had found as we ran back and we stepped down inside, finding some valves to turn and seeing most, although not all, of the spray stop. Phew. As we walked back I tried to knock on Mihai’s door and Kevin went to find his phone to call him so that we could let him know what happened. Kevin got hold of him and he said he’d be there in a few minutes so I meandered back over to the house, glad the dripping noise had more or less stopped.
I opened the front door and had time to think “oh no!” before I started running upstairs – water was pouring down through the ceiling into the living room, kitchen and hallway; it was pretty much raining indoors. Upstairs I found that most of the carpet squares were floating and quickly lifted my things onto my bed, but with no time to waste I ran into the bathroom to find another burst pipe gushing water but no valve visible to stop it. Once again I sprinted back across the road. “Mihai!” I shouted, banging on his front door. “Kevin!” I shouted across at the furnace room. No answer at Mihai’s and so having explained to Kevin what I had found this time he went inside to call him again. But then I saw him walking along the road. I shouted for Kevin, ran toward Mihai and we both jogged over to the boys’ house as I explained. We headed straight into the furnace room again as the master valve was in there and the water was able to be stopped. The irony of it all was that the plumbing had been off since we got there (we had been showering, etc., in the girls’ house) and the day it got turned back on it burst the pipes. Kevin had left the house only about an hour and a half before I had headed back to it, so it hadn’t been too long that the pipes had burst, but it was long enough that as we walked back into the house, although the pipes weren’t spewing upstairs, the water was still “raining” downstairs.
So our morning involved placing buckets under the drips, then rounding up as many of the girls as were spare so that we could mop up the water downstairs, pull up the carpet squares upstairs and then use buckets to clear out the water in the furnace room.
Everything is as dry and clean as it can be now, and the pipes have been fixed, but it looks like the spaces on the sofas and floor at the girls’ house will now be our beds for the remainder of our time here 😛
