Adventures at The Bunny Manse

Thought the pipes were frozen. Harris crawled around the crawl space with a heater to unfreeze them. after about 40 minutes!!!! We had water. Then a huge bang and water all over the yard. Waiting for the plumber now. Update 1 ... Bill and I spent three hours digging this afternoon to try to find the pipe. First we found a capped off galvanized pipe (prolly gas or old water) then the cast iron sewer line, then I saw some green. COPPER! We dug more carefully around, turned the water back on and saw that it was leaking from the junction. Basically, where our copper piping connects to the city's galvanized is bad. Technically we should pitch a fit that the city has galvanized running to our house and have them change it out to copper. We'll do that at some point. Today, my heros over at Brown Brothers are going to put some compression fitting on the two pipes and join them back and then we'll have water again. HUZZAH! They are off to get the part now. ...

 I have this problem with kitchens. If it's in a cabinet I either forget that I own one (or several...) or cannot find it when I need it. I also often get confused as to which cabinets hold which items, so go randomly opening doors to find things like cups.   Our kitchen window and door placement did not leave many options for upper cabinets (the kind that normally have glass doors) so Harris agreed to make me some floating shelves.   My requirement: They not be cabinets. His requirements: TheyNOT look cluttered, be oversized, be too high, or be made of metal.   I came across an idea on This Old House for floating shelves and Harris improved upon the method. Over the course of the past couple of weeks we've measured, planned, and then forgot to finish the project. That happens when pipes break.   My smiling proud bearded man.     These are the metal screw rods drilled into the studs at some Harris determined angle. ...

so... that flooding in the crawl space where the sump pump was turned off... yeah... it also put out the pilot light in the water heater. The water heater that then decided not to relight. Apparently the heat exchange/I don't know what I'm talking about blew and needed to be replaced.  Harris called PSNC initially thinking he was being a spaz about lighting the pilot. They got here and said 1. they don't work on the brand of water heater we have and 2. some part was totally messed up that we'd have to special order.  So Harris called the plumber who said they didn't work on the brand either. So then Harris went to Home Depot and bought a water heater. And then went to Home Depot again to get some pipe or something. Madeline and I are eating pizza and watching The Incredibles.

We thought we made it through the polar vortex with just some chilly colds. Harris was going to cook up some steak and spinach and instead, when checking out at Whole Foods, I see I've missed some texts and calls from Harris. He spent the evening crawling to the location of the burst pipe, capping said pipe, and being wet, muddy, and cold. But now we have running water *inside* the pipes instead of in the yard, driveway, and crawlspace.