Yesterday morning, Lisa got up to take a shower (her schedule is based on the classes she teaches, and thus gets up earlier than me somedays and later on others). I tried to sleep in some as I was up late doing something stupid, undoubtedly. But my efforts were thwarted as she quietly woke me up – the cold water wasn’t turning off. Oh joy.
The upstairs bathroom in our place was an afterthought. And it shows. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE having a second full bath in our bedroom. But it was not designed well, and there was some obvious skimping of money (the inspector was sure it was not done by a contractor). No biggie, we hope to remodel down the line when we have real money. But I decided quickly on that we’d probably have to at least replace the fixtures in the shower as they just didn’t work well – way too loose and couldn’t be tightened.
Well, the cold water handle must have completely stripped itself inside, because nothing I did could get it to turn the water off. I took the handle off, tried to turn the plastic thingy, then the metal thingy. Finally I took a scraper to it and whacked off the cover from the wall. No dice – there was no access to the pipes from any angle. So I killed the water main. “Great!” exclaims Lisa in triumph. “No,” I said, “Now we have no water.”
After trying some of the valves in the bathroom itself, I finally restore the water and start hunting around the basement. With my incredible detective skills (and the fact that half of them didn’t turn) I finally turned something and heard the water stop running. Much to my amazement, we still had water on the first floor. I managed to just kill the cold water upstairs – who would have thought I would accomplish what I set out.
Now life is back to normal – we just ignore the shower in our bedroom for now. Two months ago I swore I would let stuff like this happen in my home. Now I’m wondering how long I’ll be able to last before breaking down and admitting it needs to be fixed. Probably once I find out where else I shut off water…
I’m sorry. I really am.
It’s ok for now. But I just have this funny feeling that I killed our washingmachine, too. I think I just need a bigger wrench to get part of the fixture off. If not, I’m going to have to bust through the tile in the shower – and that’s really going to suck.