Preventative Maintenance

Let's just say you get home from work and walk over to the sink and turn on the faucet (to do the dishes from dinner the night before) and get nothing. You then go find your husband to tell him the waters off and he's pulling a city water bill out of the filing cabinet and asks you "Where's the phone. It's not on the charger?!"
"Hey Ryan, did you know the water's off?" "Now is not the time to ask me questions, Peaches." Let's just say your husband then disappears. If that were to happen to me, I would start investigating. Holes, lots of holes in the backyard. Looks like someone was working on the sprinklers. Ah hah, a broken sprinkler pipe. And what's this? The husband is talking to Don Dial, our wonderful neighbor who knows a lot and has done even more. Hmmm. The next thing I know, there's an even bigger hole in the front yard...we're talking 4 feet deep.

Now, we have a lot of kids on our street and not much excitement happens on Lynwood so when someone is digging a 4 foot hole the kiddies are going to want to hang around to see what's going on. And that's just they did, if this would have really happened last night, which it didn't. I now have an excuse to hang around too, ya' know, to make sure the little ones don't get in ma' hubby's way while he's working. Turns out, Ryan cut through a pipe fixing the sprinklers, turned the water off to fix the pipe, and 20 mins later noticed an even bigger leak at our main water source. He gets the valve off, and while he's down there he may as well replace the old parts with new ones. Those elbow buggers didn't want to come off. There was a chain, 3 wrenches, rebar, multiple small pipes, a sledgehammer, and a car jack involved. But yes, the elbow came off. After a trip to Lowes, Home Depot, then back to Lowes, 17 man hours, a homemade pizza (my contribution) and working until 11:30pm, the new valve did the same thing the old one was doing.

Lesson learned...if you turn off your water and there's water coming out at a very high pressure from the main main valve, that valve has a pressure release that will release all the water in the pipes. Oh and P.S. the new valve was put on backwards. I'm sure that will be fixed in a jiffy today.

This really would've sucked if it would've really happened yesterday. Thank goodness it didn't.