Day 379: That's A Lot of Water!

There were several options that got bandied about for the title of this post.

• Our First Home Disaster
• In Came The Flood (In honour of the fantastic Wintersleep song. [Fun side note: We were lucky enough to see them live back in October with Elliott Brood. We stood front row centre like proper nerds. Mark Sasso of Elliott Brood scoffed at Garrett for not dancing.])
• The Conversation You Don't Want to Have on the Way Back from Buying Sandwich Ingredients

They all portray last night's events fairly accurately, but none so much as the title we landed on. Yes, it was indeed a lot of water! And it begins something like this:

On the way back from the print shop and grocery store, we find ourselves standing outside in the falling snow, staring at water pouring off the window sill under the kitchen window.

- Um...where is all that water coming from?

Our eyes and hands go searching for a big drip coming from the roof... and come up dry.

- I think it's coming from the kitchen...

- Can't be... this is above the level of the tap...

Several seconds of staring at the drip, drip, dripping water pass before Garrett heads inside. I linger, open the door, and hear:

- It's coming from inside! (The house is flooding!)

It was as if someone had transformed the kitchen light into a tap and left it on full blast. Garrett ran upstairs to figure out what happened. I ran downstairs to turn off the main water valve. The river in the kitchen was still running. We both gathered our arsenal - the shop vac for Garrett and buckets and sponges for me - and went to town trying to contain the worst of it and soak it all up. So this the culprit under the sink in the upstairs bathroom:

It will be a sweet day when we rip out this whole rusty mess to re-do the upstairs bath.

The full force of the water coming in from the municipal pipes (and we have quite high pressure) burst through to create this hole:

To add insult to injury, the torn stainless steel likes to stab you in the finger.

Water gushed out all over the bathroom floor before it spread into the hallway and spilled into gaps under the hallway baseboard and into the walls. Finding itself now on the kitchen ceiling, the water went for the path of least resistance: the hole in the middle of the ceiling where the kitchen light is installed. This turned our kitchen floor into a kiddie pool. Here is what it looked like this morning, with a line roughly showing the outer edge of the pool we came home to:

The water also seeped over the threshold onto the dining room carpet.

A bunch of the water found its way past the kitchen ceiling threshold and continued on down the exterior wall, some of it coming out at the kitchen window, some coming out into the kitchen cupboards, and some going all the way to the basement. The water pooling on the kitchen floor also spilled over into the basement through the return air vent under the kitchen sink and the wall beside where the old fridge was.

Upstairs, the water had filled the hallway, entered the back bedroom (above the dining room), and seeped a bit into the front bedroom (our current bedroom). Thankfully, our shop vac is a wet/dry one so Garrett was able to get the water off of the wood floors quickly. There doesn't appear to be any damage to the floors - just some slightly raised edges that should go back to normal as everything dries.

In the dining room, the bit of water that found its way onto the ceiling spilled out of the light fixture hole and onto the dining room table. Most got soaked up by my notes and the rest just pooled on the table.

Nothing like showing up at your first committee meeting with a stack of water-wrinkled notes.

In the basement, the water showed up in the laundry/bathroom. Most of the water came down the wall to the right of the dryer, having traveled down that wall all the way from the floor of the bathroom upstairs. This water spilled out of the bathroom and pooled on a low spot under the classy foam carpet. Some also came down that exterior wall onto the ledge of the little window, much of it soaked up by the flowery, sheer curtain we inherited. The third source was that return vent duct from under the kitchen sink, though it didn't seem to cause much more than some drips onto the washer and tiled floor.

The kitchen bore the brunt of the damage. We left the heat on all night to dry things out and water was still dripping from a few spots in the ceiling when we got up this morning. The worst appears to be this seam in the ceiling tile beside the light, where the water would have been sitting patiently waiting its turn to gush onto the kitchen floor.

At least we don't need to go searching for the seams between the ceiling tiles now!

Possibly most annoying of all: much of the water that came out at the exterior wall-ceiling seam found itself in our kitchen cupboards and proceeded to dirty all of our dishes with gross ceiling water. Having to do all of our dishes that were dirtied by something other than tasty food... not cool. After making life annoying, that water then dripped onto the countertop oven. We haven't used it to cook anything yet but a quick test suggests it was undamaged. Which brings me to an important point. We are lucky. Perhaps not the thought you had in mind, but there are so many reasons we're lucky that the damage wasn't worst / more annoying:

• We were out of the house for less than an hour. We have no idea how long it was between the pipe bursting and our standing under the window sill and gaping open mouthed at the dripping water... but it could have been worst. We had actually bounced around the idea of going out for supper while doing errands. Let's not imagine what kind of damage there might have been if we had stayed out an extra hour.
• We haven't painted the basement bathroom yet. Hooray for dilly-dallying and procrastination! It would be much more annoying if we had freshly painted walls now stained or peeling.
• The rack of "dry flat" shirts sitting in front of the dryer didn't require another wash and several days of drying time. Good... because the laundry machines are busy washing the piles of towels we used last night :)
• The plaster ceilings in the dining and living rooms aren't damaged. Lucky considering this peeling paint is in the kitchen just on the other side of the dining room wall:

Crown moulding in the kitchen bears the brunt of the water damage, keeping the dining room plaster looking spic and span.

• Plaster damage was likely prevented by the light fixture hole acting as an attractive outlet for the water that did end up above the dining room. And, once again, how lucky that my laptop was sitting a foot away rather than directly beneath the light fixture. There were a few drops that splashed on the keyboard/screen but nothing deadly.
• We live in a to-be construction zone. This is probably the most important point. The kitchen, which suffered the worst, is set to be gutted anyways. If we had a brand new kitchen or even a not-brand-new-but-perfectly-dandy kitchen, the tone of this post would likely be much grumpier.

Thankfully, you are not reading that grumpy post. As for fixing the problem, it was a simple matter of buying another couple of these pipe connectors and replacing the old ones. The cold water one hadn't burst but we weren't taking any chances.

"No-burst"? I beg to differ.

The labels are stamped August 2000 so these babies were put in less than 13 years ago. I suppose that's decent performance for a part costing less than $5 that's used many times in a single day. Let this be a warning to anyone with these flexible, braided hoses under their sinks (manufacturer warranty lasts 5 years). All in all, we survived our first home disaster and lived to tell the tale. And I think I'll end the tale at that... there's a big pile of dishes waiting to be done.