Home Seep Home

If it's true that "a man's home is his castle", then my castle has developed a couple indoor moats. The presence of water in unexpected places has become the major topic of conversation in our house, sending other news worthy, earth shattering questions like "who will win American Idol?", "should we invest in an ark?" and "what's that smell?" down the conversational ladder. I wish I could place the blame for all our drippage squarely at the feet of Mother Nature, but she can only be charged with a portion of the aquatic crimes. All the rain we have been getting over the last few weeks, may in fact be "good for the lawns", but listen you rain inducing wench, I don't have sod in my bathroom, so give it a rest.

Last week "Wife" pointed out that there seemed to be water coming in through the skylight in our bathroom. Who knew we even had a skylight? That's a bit of an exaggeration, I knew we had one, I just never bothered to look up while in the bathroom. I'm so busy gazing at myself in the mirror and enjoying how I look bathed in Natural light that I never took a second to consider the source of said light. With great effort, I craned my neck and, what do you know, there was water dripping from the edges of the skylight. Judging from the stains, there must have been water seeping in for a while, but it had never dripped, so we lived our lives in a kind of "head in the sand" ignorance. With my head pulled from the sand, I did what I always do in times of home repair crisis, I swore. Then I called my friend Mike. He's an architect, handy guy and the person I still blame for finding this house for us. I wanted his opinion on my next step for a couple reasons, first he has a number of light holes in his roof and second, I know if I called in some "professional" I would end up with a new roof, a sealed driveway and an appointment with a bankruptcy attorney. He looked at the offending opening and came to the same conclusion that "Wife" and I had. It was leaking. Mike offered to help with a simple repair, and being a guy who's never going to stand in the way of someone else climbing a ladder, I accepted. I'll leave out a lot of the other details of this part of the tale, but I will tell you that Mike came over yesterday afternoon, and instead of us fixing the problem from the inside, he scurried up on the roof and did some caulk magic on the outside. I'm about to go upstairs and see if the effort was successful.

The same bathroom is causing problems with plumbing leaks. We've already had to have one hole cut into our kitchen ceiling to determine the appearance of a water stain, and last week another stain appeared, indicating another water mystery. I think it would be better for houses to be built with the plumbing on the outside of the wall to expedite repairs. This morning I was "in the library" sitting on my porcelain reading chair when I heard what sounded like water pouring onto the floor. "Well I must be imagining things. There's no way water can be cascading onto my kitchen floor. That's crazy, maybe the fumes in the "library" are getting to me.", I thought, but finished my "article" quickly and went to investigate. To say that the hole in the kitchen ceiling resembled a water fall would not be too far from the truth. Water was pouring out of the ceiling faster that bar patrons at a Great White concert. What did I do? Yeah, I swore, weren't you paying attention earlier? As I yelled upstairs for towels and to alert not only "Wife" and "Daughter" but judging from my volume, the entire neighborhood, "Wife" informed me that the toilet in our bathroom was overflowing. That's right, pooh water was spilling into our kitchen at a rapid rate. I kept referring to it as "pooh water", but "Wife" wasn't buying into that. However since I'm the one who was charged with the clean up and disinfecting of the kitchen island and floor, I stand by my judgement . The only casualty, besides our bank account seems to have been the toaster. It was flooded with the pooh water and I threw it out. I don't know about you, but I would never be able to enjoy a toasty bagel knowing that at one time pooh water had filled the slots.

I had to take a break from my plumbing woes and start prepping for another "Two scoops of Brian weekend" on WGN. The big shows are taking shape and I promise to only talk about the further adventures of pooh water a little bit. I hope you can join me for all the fun Friday/Saturday from 2-5 am and Saturday/Sunday from 1-5 am. Plus, if you know a dependable, honest plumber, have them contact me. I've got to go stick more fingers in some other house related dikes. Have a great weekend. Later....Brian