For Want of A Nail; or As The Drying Fan Hums

My apologies for not blogging more. With the Jakester doing the Summer Camp thing all day I thought I'd have more time. Ha!

Part of the reason for that is humming in the background. You see, one night I noticed the sink in the hall bathroom (its not really a hall bathroom, it’s the upstairs bathroom shared by Jake and the guest room, but that takes too long to type) was draining rather slowly. This is odd all by itself since the things that normally get drains clgged up don't go on in there, unless the dogs are using it to trim their whiskers or something. Anyway, I made a note to try doing something about it in the next day or two. Because you are reading this here, you know where this is heading.

Well, the next day or two were busy. And Monday night I headed upstairs after cleaning to get Jacob to bed early. I headed for the hall bath to get his toothbrush set up and discovered a lake had formed. The water had not been completely turned off at the sink (something I had fussed at him before) and had overflowed. It was probably 3/4 of an inch deep.

I screamed threw down a couple of towels on the carpet and ran to grab a wet-dry vac to suck up the water. Actually, that was not the best idea; the vac is really for cleaning floors, not for flood control. Trish got about a zillion towels thrown down in order to soak up the water. Somewhere in the dashing about we saw that water was forming on the ceiling of the room below, and even dripping down from a fluorescent light fixture (which we turned off and in a calmer moment I taped over the switches, because every time I went in there I wanted to turn on the light).

At this point Trish suggested it might be a good idea for me to contact a water removal and remediation service. Actually, I think her words were more like "I think you should call somebody RIGHT NOW!" I was not frankly, operating at a high level in this mini-crisis. My high point was that bit with the tape. Anyway, I did call places, and the first ones to make it got the work.

By the time they arrived, which was actually fairly quick, all things considered, we had sopped up pretty much all the standing water, and the dripping down into the kitchen had slowed considerably. After looking things over this is what was done: several holes were drilled in the ceiling of the kitchen to get airflow to the subflooring, and four largish fans were set up to blow air under the carpets and up into those holes.

That was Monday night. Its Wednesday morning right now, and the guys are supposed to come this afternoon to see if the fans can be removed. I've also summoned a plumber to deal with the drain, which mysteriously refilled itself at least twice since we shut it off.