Master Plumbers

Let me tell you, we're becoming master's at this home ownership thing! We've had an outside water faucet that was giving us a hard time last year, and hasn't worked at all this year. So, being the great "Do-it-yourselfers" that we are. . . we thought we'd fix the problem by replacing the faucet. Why we decided to do it at 10 p.m. on a Friday night is now beyond me, but what can I say. So Jon turned off the main water valve in the house and proceed remove the faucet. I was upstairs when I heard a pop, Jon saying "Oh No!" and a gushing water sound. I went running downstairs to see water shooting into the wall and all over the downstairs living room. What in the world, the water shut off valve was OFF! Now what? I reached into the wall and tried from the inside while Jon pushed from the outside to reconnect the faucet, but the pressure coming from the pipe was just too much! Water was shooting all over me, the living room, inside the wall and even outside the house. The basement was flooding!

Not knowing what else to do, I ran next door to get the neighbors. Sleepily, the lady next door comes out wanting to know what is going on. Her husband wasn't home, so she and I ran next door to fetch the next neighbor. Out in the their pajamas, they all come to the rescue. I grabbed the water key to turn off the outside water that was right by the house, but needless to say, that only turns off the sprinkler water. While all this was happening, the neighbor got the water shut off out on the street. . . but by this time, the damage had already been done! We had water all over the basement. It soaked about 3/4th of the family room, ran into the under stairs storage, out into the garage and out into the driveway. Here's the access panel we were working through (you can't see it in the picture, but the water shut off valve we had turned off is right above the panel in the ceiling). Also, here's a picture of the pipe we were fixing.

Here's more pictures of the damage.


We ended up calling a disaster recovery company that came out to assess and fix the damage. They had to pull up the carpet, rip out the carpet pad, suck the water out of the carpet, remove all the sheet rock and insulation and put down industrial fans to dry everything. We are now just waiting for everything to dry so they can come back and re-do the sheet rock, carpet, etc . Interestingly enough, when they removed the sheet rock, we found the actual main water valve shut-off. Looks like someone who lived in the house before sheet rocked in the valve, then either didn't want to redo it, or didn't know where it was, so they put in a the valve in the ceiling that we had shut off. Needless to say, the one in the ceiling turned off everything in the house except the one and only faucet we were working on. What a learning experience! Here's some more pictures of what it looks like without the sheet rock. Quite the interesting weekend! We're laughing about it a lot now, but hoping and praying we never have to experience something like this again!