On Thursday night last week, I was getting into bed when I heard the strangest sound coming from my bathroom. It almost sounded like someone turned my bathtub on, but I knew that unless someone broke into my bathroom to do that, it wasn’t that. I was a bit tired so it took me a moment to get out of bed to investigate the noise, but as soon as I got into the bathroom, I’m glad I didn’t take longer.
The hose that connects the water from the valve in the wall to my sink had disconnected and water was spraying everywhere! There was already a layer of water on the floor and it was spilling into my bedroom.
After a second of freaking out, I knew that I needed to stop the water. My dad had showed me in the past how to shut off the water from both inside and outside my house. So I located the shut off valve in the wall and reached in to turn it off.
Then, I realized that the hose that disconnected was the hot water hose. And I keep my water heater really hot, so the water coming out was really hot as well. I knew I had to turn it off no matter what, so I reached in, ignored the pain from the hot water, and got the flooding to stop.
I then took a moment to evaluate the situation. I could see exactly which hose broke, but I knew that I didn’t want to fix this myself in case there was a bigger problem than that.
I got all the water cleaned up from the bathroom and bedroom floor and sent an emergency email to my landlord about this. Then I called my mom to ask about the pain I was feeling on my arm, shoulder, and back. All my skin was bright red and shiny, but my mom said that I should be fine (this issue was what made my workout on Friday tough).
The next morning, the handyman got to my house. He saw the problem and said that it would be a simple fix. About 15 minutes later, he put a new hose in and it was working great. Then he tested the cold water and the valve broke out of the wall and caused another flood.
And this time, since the valve was no longer in the wall, he had to run outside my house to turn off the water to my entire house from the outside. This also meant that the flooding was worse than what it was the night before.
Again, I cleaned up the flooding and worked on drying things that got wet (towels, rugs, and my shower curtain). But fortunately the handyman helped me because he said that this was his fault.
After about another hour, everything was fixed and better than ever.
So, what did I learn from having 2 floods within 11 hours? I’m sure happy that my dad taught me some very basic plumbing information so I could shut off the water. The handyman said that he’s been to places where the tenant didn’t know how to do that so the flooding was going until he got there and it usually got pretty bad. I’m also grateful that this happened when I was home. I couldn’t imagine how horrible it would have been if this happened when I was gone for several hours. It also made me happy that I rent and none of the repairs were at my cost. But I would eventually like to own a house or condo and I really should learn how to do some more things so that I could fix things like this on my own.
And I guess my floors are probably the cleanest they’ve been in a while since they got washed and deep cleaned twice in two days.
You Might Also Like
Unexpected Problems (or This Is Why I’m Glad I Rent)
Another Leak In My House (or Testing My Patience)
Training Day At A New Possible Job (or Next Time, I’ll Give Myself 3 Hours To Get There)
Having Water At A Wine Bar (or Getting A Temporary Job)
LA Is Shut Down Again (or Somehow This Makes Me Feel Better)
Another Test Of Being Grateful (or Again I’m Glad I Rent)
