Postdeluvian Carnage

I realized with the last blog that I mentioned The Flood, but never wrote about it in our blog. It all started with a Sunday night noise in the garage. The compressor was running for no apparent reason. It was about dinner time when I went out to check why. I opened the door to the compressor room, couldn't see a reason why, and shut off the breaker. I would check it out the next day after work. Later that same night, Janene saw a mouse in the garage, so she opened the door to let it out. Then we went to bed.

I was awakened at about 3:30 AM to the sound of "KaTink"! It sounded for all the world like someone was smacking a metal pipe. No worries- the house always makes sounds. At 4:00 AM, heard another "KaTink"! This time I thought for sure it was a pipe so I got up. There was no water upstairs in the sinks or toilets. I knew that meant we had some frozen pipes, so I went downstairs to investigate. The garage was freezing cold, the door was open,the door to the compressor room was open too, and I could tell the pipe shaft to upstairs was a lot colder than it should be. I grabbed an electric heater and put it in the garage(after closing the door) thinking that if things got warmer the pipes would thaw. Now, to get back to bed. ZZZZ!

 Janene dreamed that she had done something wrong with a computer and was now in trouble with the police. She was trying to find a lawyer before I found out about the terrible thing she had done, and that woke her up. She went downstairs and discovered water spraying out of the wall, with a flap of sheetrock
modulating the spray just like a rainbird and it was "watering" our living room garden! Furniture and all.

 We went downstairs and discovered that it was raining in the basement and a lake had formed downstairs.

 We found two more places where pipes had burst and had to cut two more holes in the wall to get to them. One hole was right behind our lawn sprinkler timer, so that was all messed up.

 Our food storage room was full of water, but luckily, most of the important stuff was up off the floor.

 In our storage room where all the kid's stuff is stored, we had water everywhere. Again, luckily the worst of the damage was to the 7 tons of National Geographics we have stored in the basement. Most everything else was up off the floor.

 The furnace did not fare so well. The furnace was full of water pouring into it from the ductwork upstairs. We could hear electrical buzzing and arcing sounds coming from the furnace. I had to think twice about stepping into the water in my bare feet to get to the shutoff valve. In the end, a lot of the furnace controls needed to be replaced before we could get the heat back on. That meant propane heaters, electric space heaters and a full fire in the fireplace on a red burn day. We had to call disaster cleanup and HVAC guys to help us out. We also had to call in Brother Tolman to fix the plumbing and Larry to fix the electrical.

The culprits ended up being the three "KaTink" pipes that burst in the night and then sprayed water once they  thawed out. Even with all this damage, it was not near so bad as the trouble Janene had dreamed herself into - and that made it easier for her to bear. So the moral of the story is never leave the door to the compressor open  and don't be afraid to let a mouse share in the warmth of our happy (and heated) home.