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!!!

"New" (to us) Car!

Cass and I bought a "new" used car to replace the Oldsmobile. The Olds was really starting to show signs of it's age and since I have an older truck as well we decided we should have at least one newer, reliable car!

So we found this ad on craiglist for a 2002 RAV4 with 45K miles on it, came out to look at it and took it for a test drive! The guy was asking $3k under the blue book value for it, so obviously we had to be somewhat skeptical about it. It had been in an accident but the owner had the damage fixed and there was no structural damage to the car's frame. It turned out to be a pretty solid deal for us so we made an offer and he accepted. We had a pretty good amount of money saved up for the car, but what we offered meant we'd have to take out a small loan but we plan on paying it off real fast.

So, the one hitch we ran into was in order to actually transfer the title, we had to send the title to Bosnia! The owner's wife whose name was also on the title needed to sign it as well in order for us to transfer the title. So a month of waiting and four trips to the SOS office later, we finally got the title transferred. We like our "new" car.

Edit: 11/4/2011 We paid off the car. It's now ours!! We also added some new aesthetic enhancments!

New Closet

Yet another area of our house that had poorly planned out and poorly used storage, our walk-in closet off our bedroom. The closet had one shelf that wrapped around the entire closet at about 6 feet high which was great for having a bunch of long hanging space, but we needed a lot more shelf space than that. Cass had been saying she wanted to redo the closet since Christmas, and since I'm so fast about getting around to starting projects, we started the weekend before the 4th of July (half a year later)! The closet had the style of hanging where you had to put the hangers on backwards which Cass "loved" as you can see from her expression. The original plan was to clear out the closet, and have it painted by the end of Saturday and hang the shelves on Sunday! Yeah, we'll see about that.



I got the old shelves torn out on Friday only to reveal some lovely gaping holes in the drywall! Greeaat. So I filled those on Friday which meant we had to wait until Saturday to paint. Then, on Saturday morning the joint compound I used to fill the holes hadn't dried yet, >.< D'OH! I must've put too much in the holes. I got out the hair dryer and dried them out and after some sanding, we got crackin' on painting the walls. We decided to use the same green color that we have on the walls in our bedroom that face north and south. (The east and west walls are a tan color. See May 26, 2009.)
The white paint behind the coat of paint we put on was of course gloss finish, so the first coat of paint looked terrible and we knew that we'd have to put another coat on, but our dilemma was how much more paint do we buy? Do we just get a quart or spring for the gallon which is twice the price? Will we have enough for the second coat? What if it needs a third coat? We decided to just get a quart and it turned out to be just enough! Score 1 for us! Cass liked it so much, I thought the closet would make a nice bedroom for her. We had to wait for 24 hours to let the paint cure before we hung anything on the walls. So we waited for about 18 hours and I got started putting up the first set of shelves. As I mentioned before, my plan was to finish the shelves on Sunday. The following picture on the left shows you how far I got on Sunday. Yeah, I fell a bit behind schedule! It wasn't particularly difficult to put the shelves up, it's just that I'd never done it before and I wasn't sure the best way to do it making sure the shelves were level. I figured out a system and got one finished and one more half way hung. I'm used to things taking longer than I expect, though. Happens all the time.

Monday after work I started hanging more shelves and got the long shelves on Cass's wall and my wall finished. With my "system" I started working faster, so it took me a quarter the time it took me on Sunday to do her two shelves and finish my wall. Cass and I host a small group on Tuesdays, so I didn't get to work on it the next evening. On Wednesday though, I got the two shelves with the hanging bars on the broad wall that faces the door. When we got that up, things really started to take shape and we were excited about finishing the closet. Thursday came along and I didn't have band practice at church, so I was determined to get the closet finished. I just had a few more small shelves to hang, so I knew it was doable. Probably the most difficult single task to do during this whole thing was cutting the shelves because I had to use a hack saw. I didn't have a power tool I could use :-(, and of course since I was hanging 5 small shelves, this involved the most cutting! Nevertheless, I got them all cut and hung.

Here's the finished product with our clothes finally in place with plenty of space to spare.


And the best part is all the shelves are like this...

LEVEL!!!