It’s been kind of an exhausting week regarding our house! On Sunday night, I came downstairs, after being upstairs for about 2 1/2 hours, and I noticed that my slippers were kind of sticky. After dismissing it, I felt it again, and sure enough, it was water on the soles of my comfy Ugg slippers. Where was this coming from? I turned the downstairs hall light on and what do you know…this is what we discovered.
Where did this water and dirt (?) come from????
Here.
What is going on?!?!
Somehow our half bath sink got backed up, overflowed, spilled over the counter, throughout the cabinet, all over the floors in the bathroom and then down the entire downstairs hall and left a layer of dirt water. And when we found it, it was already drying up.
So this week we’ve been dealing with a domino effect of trying to figure this whole puzzle out. Turns out, we need our old cast iron pipes replaced, and we’re starting with the main issue. But to discover this out, we needed to have another access cut in our entry closet’s floor. The house didn’t have access to underneath this part of the house, so we needed to make an access hole to see what was going on under the house.
You can kind of see the outline of the access “door” in the floor.
Turns out it wasn’t too bad under there, but our main heating vent was sitting on a big part of the cast iron that needs to be replaced. So a few other people have headed over to figure out the best route to deal with this issue.
And since I had the plumber out, I decided to get a quote on putting in our new garbage disposal that we got for Christmas (exciting, right?! But really, it kind of is!) and when he looked under the kitchen sink, he goes “Ooooh Man!”
What now?!?!
Turns out during the inspection we had when we were buying the house (which by the way, that inspector has cost us thousands of dollars in issues he missed), it was notated that the garbage disposal was in need of replacing. The fact that the drain under the sink is almost a foot above where the it meets the garbage disposal and the other sink drain and the pipes need to fill up almost a foot to then drain upward was missed.
WHAT?!
Seems like your home is always a puzzle to figure out, or a story unraveling, especially with an older home. You’ve got a good amount of information, but you’re always missing key points until the house reveals it to you; hopefully in a nice, gentle way. And the longer you live there, the more you understand your home and it’s past. And you can start to fix the issues that arise and, like I mentioned in this post, leave your home better than you found it.
Tomorrow, the plumber starts working on replacing old, rusty pipes.
And our 48 year old house will get a little nip and tuck and feel, hopefully, a bit more taken care of and loved.
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