Derailed

While I would love to be triumphantly posting about the freshly painted living room, I'm afraid that's not possible because, well, it isn't freshly painted. Yet. But I do have an excuse as to why I along with my grand plan was thrown rather off track this week.

We noticed when we moved in our water pressure wasn't great and eventually we noticed when standing down in the basement next to where the water line comes into the house that we could here a faint rushing noise, like, well, water gushing from a pipe somewhere underground. But there was no water coming into the basement, which meant no crisis, which resulted in the attitude, "Yeah, we should probably deal with this, but not today."

Well when we arrived home from our extended holiday earlier this month we found the water pressure had gotten substantially worse, to the point that it was a real struggle to get the shower to stay on. So we finally put in a call to the city last week to come have a look. Long story a bit shorter, we had an underground leak on our waterline and were given six days to get it fixed.

Luckily, thanks to the learning experiences provided by our last house, we had taken out a separate little insurance policy that covers the water and sewer lines between the house and the street which aren't covered by homeowner's insurance. So we didn't have to pay anything out of pocket for our brand new water line. But that did not keep Tuesday from being an exceedingly stressful day as the contractors kicked things off by cutting into the line in the basement without ensuring that the supply was fully turned off first, which sent water spraying in all directions for 10 or so minutes before they figured how to start directing it into buckets. An hour later they finally managed to get things actually shut off and assume the repairs. Thankfully most of the things sitting nearby in storage were in plastic tubs and not cardboard boxes.

So with a wet basement, the yard looking like this, and nightmarish amounts of mud being tracked into the house, I spent most of the day gritting my teeth and thinking that the low water pressure hadn't been so bad after all.

They did manage to pull the old line out and put the new in without having to dig right up to the house, so our bushes and sidewalk were saved. But unfortunately, driveway and yard are still a muddy mess (and yard will probably be staying that way for a couple of months) and we've yet to get the basement put back as it was before. 

But there is always tomorrow and I am hoping for a super-productive weekend to get things back on track.

Now I think I will go take a shower while doing laundry and running the dishwasher just because I can.