Phone Calls From the Crawl Space
Some friends of our daughter and son-in-law are in the process of buying their first house, and also expecting their first child. They wonder about the new level of responsibility and are maybe worrying about what is to come.
And well they might.
We have recently returned to Colorado to prepare our house here for eventual sale. (I have my doubts about selling it in the market as it is right now, but we will sell it eventually.) Having just gone through this process after inheriting and selling Karen's mother's house last year, we are well aware of all of the things that we will be going through. It's not an easy process.
To start with, there is a list of things that we have lived with in this house that must be corrected or improved for someone else to be interested in buying it. Isn't it odd that we are so forgiving of the flaws in our houses when we live there, but so harsh about judging the condition of a potential new place we might buy? But when you live in a place day after day, little things that aren't perfect and which require some of your precious money or even more precious time to fix somehow just don't seem as urgent as having time with the family or going to a movie.
But they accumulate. And then, when the time comes to sell, you realize that your house reflects all too accurately your internal psychological landscape: it's deeply flawed, messy, and disorganized. You also realize that your house all too accurately presents the real you to the outside world. And you realize that the world will recoil in horror from what they see.
Not the best start for a sales presentation.
If we had set out on a campaign to make all these repairs and corrections to our nice house for ourselves, for our own on-going occupancy, this project might be a source of joy. But doing it now, as an incentive to sell, feels a little like a betrayal of a structure that has been a loyal and well-loved part of our family for over thirty years. Why didn't we take loving care of our sweet little house all these years? I feel like we're putting pancake make-up and lipstick on it and sending it out in the night to find some male companionship.
So we are trudging through our list of items, cross-prioritized by urgency and cost, one at a time. The urgency metric can zoom something which has lain dormant for years right to the top of the list. While we were last away, we loaned our house to my nephew and his family. What we failed to do however, was warn them that they could not use the upstairs shower, because, for the last fifteen years, at least, it has had a leak that satutrates the inside of the plumbing wall and leaks out onto the floor and the ceiling of the bathroom below.
This is the perfect example of an item which we simply ignored while we lived here. We just showered downstairs ... it is a nicer, walk-in shower, and it just didn't seem at all urgent to spend money on the upstairs shower. We always warned our guests to use the shower downstairs, and no-one ever seemed to mind. We just blew it when our nephew's family stayed here by failing to inform them.
Like everything in fixing up houses, it's not so simple as it looks. It's basically a broken control valve or pipe. It might cost maybe $250 for the plumbing repair. Alas, the plumbing is sealed up inside a wall behind a sheet of (now sodden) sheetrock and ceramic wall tiles. Ceramic walls tiles, I might add, that they no longer make.
So what do you do when faced with this repair? Opening the wall and re-closing it adds several hundred dollars to the cost of the plumbing repair. Over and above that, patching the tile will result in the shower looking ... well, looking like it has been patched. Do you replace the entire shower enclosure? That would be the high-prived choice!
So we've bit (bitten?) the bullet and hired our favorite plumber to come and fix this shower, finally. When he looks at it, he remarks that he could do it right now, today (yesterday as I write this), including the wall repair and tile work! About $1000 all together. But I, says he, must go out and try to find a matching wall tile.
"Can't you clean off the old tiles and re-use them?" I ask, trying to appear naive.
"Never works. They'll have paper from the gyp board glued to them, mortar stuck on the side, and I imagine at least one will break trying to get them out of there." I already knew all this from previous do-it-myself tiling projects. I knew he could probably clean the tiles enough to re-use them (if they all survived removal), but I also knew he would spend eight or ten hours doing so, and the cost of the work would then be $4000. I also knew from previous experience that neither my wife nor I was going to volunteer to clean the tiles.
So, we bit the bullet again (new bullet?), and told him to get started, while I drove off to find a tile match. Before I left on my quest, our plumber (Ron) pried one of the tiles off the wall with nothing more exotic than his fingernail as a tool. I stuck my color-match sample in my pocket a set off.
I often think it might be fun to have a map of my travels on any given day. If someone else were to see such a map, they would surely decide the driver of this vehicle is insane. There were figure-eights, loops, spirals, switch-backs, reversals, and all-in-all, it would have looked like my intent was to make a grand tour of the city.
Suffice it to say that I did not find a matching tile. The company that made it has long since gone out of business. Most manufacturers don't even make this size any more ... for some obscure reason, the industry has agreed than 4⅜" tiles are far superior to 4¼" tiles. Something to do with going to metric, I'm betting. But I returned from the war with a half-box of 4¼" tiles that almost match the existing ones, and Ron got the repair done by late afternoon: all new plumbing, new wallboard, new tiles in place, grouted and caulked neat and clean.
The new tile looked like a patch job, but it was neat, and now (at least as soon as all the grout and caulking was dry), the upstairs shower was functional for the first time in nearly two decades. Whoo-hoo!
So we went out for dinner with my sister, came home, watched a Netflix movie, and Karen went to bed. I turned off the tevee, and was using the downstairs bathroom when I became aware of a distrubing sound. Like dripping.
This is the homeowner's least-welcome sound. Nothing can wreck a house as quickly as water. A quarter's worth of water can do thousands of dollars worth of damage to a house, and I do not exaggerate. So, I looked at the new plumbing upstairs and saw no drips, and I listened there carefully, but I heard no sound. I looked at the plumbing downstairs, and saw no drips, but there surely was a sound - a drip, and a fast one, too.
The downstairs plumbing is visible partly from the crawl-space, so I ventured down there to see what I could see. Now I must tell you that I venture into the crawl-space only if required. I'm not as young as I used to be, and I didn't like all the squatting, crawling, dust, rocks, bugs, cobwebs, and miscellaneous hostile sheet-metal pairing and screws even then.
But I was able to make my way around the garbage bags full of Christmas decorations, around the furnace, over the left-over wood from when they built our house in 1967, over the dust bunnies of dryer lint and squirreled-away spare funace-fan pulley belts, to the corner where the plumbing was visible. And the leak was visible. There was lots of water in there, and more was coming! It was by now almost midnight, and the water had apparently been coming ever since late in the afternoon when the plumber turned the water back on after his work.
Here I would like to pause to mention "Mike's Rule of Auto Repair." It is as follows:
We think we hire people to fix our car, whereas
They think we hire them to work on our car.
This is a crucial difference.
Well, Mike's Rule of Auto Repair applies to plumbing, too. Ron the Plumber is a great guy, and very conscientious. But a couple of times, there have been little "whoops-es" with his work.
I turned off the water to the house, and opened a valve to relieve the pressure from the system to see if I could get the leak to stop. For some reason, the water just never seemed to stop coming. Where was all this water coming from? I checked the main water entry valve, and it was tightly closed, but still water ran from the faucet and the dreadful drip continued.
I eventually realized that both hot- and cold-water valves were open, and I was effectively siphoning all the water out of the water heater. So, I shut that other valve, and turned off the water heater, thinking that I was probably now cooking about a pint of water in there.
I had to wake Karen up to tell her not to bother to flush if she used the toilet in the night, and I called Ron the Plumber to leave him a message that we had sprung a leak and to call me first thing in the morning, which was this morning.
Unfortunately, first thing in this morning was Satruday, and also Valentine's Day. Which is partly why I called him at midnight-thirty. I had a vision of him and his wife leaving for a romantic weekend get-away while Karen and I were stuck here, high-and-dry, so to speak.
So, by nine o'clock, Ron had called and was on his way over. ("This never happens to me!" Ron insisted.) He made the repair, which was apparently a leak in one of the joints he had made to install the new shower valve, patched the wall (again), and turned the water back on. Everything seemed ship-shape, but I scrabbled back down under the house to look one last time, just to be sure.
As I sat there in the dirt and dust, shining my flashlight up onto the plumbing where the previous night, I had found the leak, everything looked good. Not quite dried out yet, but no actual visibly flowing water, and no new sprays or drips that I could see or hear. When all of a sudden, a I felt a drip on my shoulder.
I had my cell phone with me. I'm actually not a big cell-phone fan. but here was a time where mine paid for itself. I called my own house. I could hear the phone ringing in the kitchen, only a few feet over my head, but a painful and filthy trek through the crawl-space then the basement to travel. "Karen, tell Ron not to leave yet. There's also a leak in the hose bibb."
The ground where I was sitting was saturated; the hose bibb there had apparently been slowly leaking for a long time, and it was just a coincidence that I was sitting under it when one of the occasional drips chose to fall. And that there was a plumber in the house at the time.
So now, all of our plumbing is in good shape.
Seems to be in good shape.
Maybe.
For now.
I know nothing lasts. I just want this stuff to hold together long enough to sell the house to some other home-moaner.
posted by Mique @ 3:46 PM
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