Alice's Mommy Blog

So this is one of those really important life lessons blogs. You all know how it’s going to go, but will read on anyway.

We arrived home from vacation on Saturday night, and I was thrilled to see my vegetable garden was still alive (thanks to my amazing neighbor), our basement was not damp (go de-humidifier) and our ant problem seemed to be licked (finally). But what I noticed after everything was put away in the kitchen was that my faucet was dripping a bit. Not sure if it had been doing that since we left, but regardless it was dripping. I put a toy bucket under it and headed off to investigate. My hubby is not the handyman type, so a lot of little things like this are my domain. By now, Steve had put our kids to bed, they were peacefully asleep and he had run to the store quickly. Before you go all crazy praising the man, he wanted chips, and I had to call him to tell him to get milk for the girls.

So I looked around our basement furnace/water pump room, found a water knob turned it all the way, and headed upstairs to figure out what to do with that faucet. I watched a YouTube video, found the right tools and set about trying to figure out what size washer we were going to need. Long story short I get all the screws off, the handle is beside me, I’m playing with the wrench, and POP off flies the handle fixture and water SHOTS EVERYWHERE!

Notice how I never wrote that I confirmed that the water was off? Yeah, that’s because I didn’t bother to check, and apparently the hot water and ALL water, are controlled by different knobs! Who knew? Not me apparently!

So I grab a large tupperware to aim the gushing water into the sink instead of all over my counter, floor, me and kitchen (we later found drops of water a good 3 metres away from the site). So now I’m just freaking out! I ran to the basement to see try the knob again, and no it didn’t work this time either. So as I stand at the sink watching the immense quantity of water just gushing everywhere get closer and closer to the top of my kitchen sink I think to myself “Maybe doing home repair alone at 10pm at night after you’ve been up since 6am with a two year old, wasn’t the greatest idea I ever had!”

But lucky for me, before I could have a full scale breakdown dripping wet at the sink, I heard the front door open and I shrieked “STEVE HELP ME!” He drops the milk and runs to the kitchen to find me soaking wet standing in a puddle holding a container over our faucet yelling at him to turn off the main water main, and NOW! He rushes to the basement, tries the same one I did (see why we’re married) and then finds the big metal handle that shuts off the flow of water to our house, and turns it.

We assess the damage and use the giant bag of beach towels, that is beside the kitchen, which I conveniently had not yet put away, to clean up the flood of biblical proportions. After I explain to him what happened, we released the pressure in the pipes by opening another faucet and get the whole thing cleaned up and put back together. Then we tested it and sure enough the faucet held together after we put it all together again (we were a bit worried something may have broken when it shot off).

But you know what? The faucet isn’t leaking anymore! Just sayin’!

• ← Creative work!
• Training Tuesday – Week 1 of 15 →