When I walked into my office this morning (Tuesday) the carpeting squished beneath my bare feet. Carpet is not supposed to squish. Water!!!
My first thought was to look up. A majority of the pipes for the kitchen run above the ceiling in my office. In a prior life this room served as David’s bedroom. About thirty-five years ago he ran out of his bedroom and yelled, “It’s raining in my bedroom!” The dishwasher had gone belly up and was leaking into his ceiling. That’s why I looked up.
Up was dry.
Our utility room shares a wall with my office. I squished through the family room as I moved from my office to the utility room. There was no squish in this room. There was an inch of water so it was more of a splash. More water! Much deeper!
Again, I looked up. Pipes ran throughout this ceiling on their way to my office. Up was, once again, dry.
Next, I checked the walls and listened for the gush. No water. No gush. Whatever was leaking was low and steady. I narrowed it down to the hot water heater or the water softener. Our water heater had failed before and didn’t emit this volume of water. My deductions centered on the water softener. Walla, it was indeed the softener. I shut everything down and retrieved the shop vac. Ruth and I moved our things to higher ground and sucked (if you’ll excuse the expression) water for about an hour and a half.
It was too early to call for reinforcements so we tackled the initial work on our own. Later, we called the water softener guy (as you age you gather a lot of guys) and our insurance agent. Both calls were answered and restoration has already begun.
While waiting for the Mounties, we discovered that the water had seeped into the bathroom that is on the other side of the utility room. The laminate floor had already started to buckle and the dry wall was now wet wall.
The water softener guy determined that a valve had failed and the softener recycled repeatedly throughout the night spilling salt water on the floor. We can’t get a new softener until next Monday, but lucky for us, we have plans to be out-of-town for the week-end.
The restoration guy (now we have a restoration guy) gave us the bad news. It seems that salt water is worse than regular water when it comes to restoring things. Regular water can be dried. Salt water, and everything that it touches, must be removed. Soooooo – after everything gets dried we’ll be getting the following items replaced. Office carpeting, family room carpeting, bathroom laminate flooring, bathroom walls (partial), bathroom tile (entire), bathroom paint, and a few items of lesser note.
So here’s the lesson of the day. Be thankful that the softener failed today rather than this
coming Saturday when we plan to be out of town for five nights. If it had waited to leak until Saturday night, when we returned we’d be living in an ark.