Water troubles!

Wow, what a weekend!

Saturday 1/28/2012 late evening around maybe 8 o'clock, Cass challenges me to a game of ping-pong. So we go downstairs and get ready for a game. Cass takes the side of the table by the water heater and says "It's wet over here." One word comes to my mind "Crap!" The water heater started puking water! I frantically try to think of what you do to turn off a water heater. I mean, it's not like you just unplug it from the wall or anything. I find the valve on the water intake and close it, but embarrassingly I have to call my Dad because I don't know how to turn off the pilot. He tells me how and I feel like an idiot because it's so simple, but hey at least it's turned off right?

The one weekend I volunteer to work on Sunday is the same weekend my water heater decides to die! Figures, right? So I got someone else to take my shift and I call up my Dad again and invite him over for a water heater replacing party. Minus the "party" part. Cass and I commence shopping for a new water heater online.

You're thinking I'm gonna start talking about replacing the water heater on Sunday now, huh? Oooh no. That wasn't the end of Saturday night! Cass uses the downstairs bathroom and notices that the plumbing sounds different than usual. So I go down to the basement and the water meter's going crazy. So I said, "Well, is the toilet still running?" Nope, it stopped but the meter's still going nuts. I start following the sound of the plumbing until I notice there's water dripping from the ceiling above the stairwell. UH OH! I scale the stairs in about a half a second and run into the master bathroom to find that the water line for the toilet had busted off of the tank and was spewing water all over the bathroom! The floor had about a half inch of standing water on it by the time I was able to shut the valve and wouldn't you know it, most of that water escapes by seeping behind the walls and leaks onto the first floor ceiling above the staircase and some spilled all the way down the inside of the wall to the basement! I drilled a couple holes in the ceiling below the bathroom and ended up draining something like a half gallon of standing water out of it.

Oy vey, what a night! It's after 10 o'clock once we've got the standing water situation resolved and get the water picked up off the floor and of course neither of us are tired now with all that excitement happening. So we didn't make it to bed until about 11.

Now, Sunday was a much better day. My Dad came over bright and early and we went to Home Depot and Lowes to get a new water heater and all the extras we'd need to get it installed. We finally make it home at noon. The amazing thing is that we got the new water heater installed without incident in about 4 1/2 hours and I only had to go back to the hardware store once to pick up a couple different sized iron pipes for the gas line! We upgraded from a 40 gallon, 32,000 BTU water heater to an EnergyStar compliant 50 gallon, 40,000 BTU water heater. YEAH!

Now, here are 4 amazing things about all of this that only God could've planned.
1) We have been saving up $$ for a while now to remodel our master bathroom.
2) We weren't originally planning on replacing the water heater, but now that we have replaced it we realize that the bathroom remodel would've seemed ruined or kind of empty because we had such a crappy water heater.
3) About 90% of the stuff in our house that sustained water damage from the water line breaking were things we already had plans to replace in our bathroom remodel.
4) The cost of our new water heater and the parts we needed to install it was almost the exact amount that our tax refund is this year. So the water heater is already paid for in cash from the bathroom remodel fund and as soon as our tax refund comes, the bathroom remodel fund will be back to where it was before.

If you hadn't noticed, I mentioned a couple times that we're saving up for a bathroom remodel! So you can count on there being some more updating in the near future!!!