The Shower Leak Grows

In my house, there is a main bathroom, a showerstall bath off the main bedroom, and a "powder room" in the basement (that I installed) for convenience.  I never used the shower stall off the bedroom.  Actually, the shower stall was so useless to me that I set plastic liner in it and kept a painted turtle there for several years.  When you live alone, you can do weird stuff.

The turtle finally died (not from lack of good food) and I cleared the shower stall.  For whatever reasons, the drain leaked after that and I didn't bother with it for 15 years.   While having some general house renovations done. I had them fix the stall drain.

Several years ago, I discovered  that the shower pipes were leaking, so I put a repair on the "To DO; list.  Forward 5 years...

Having joined Angie's List to get top contractors for other reasons, I decided to have someone fix the shower stall leak.  Um, I didn't think to see if the shower stall pipes were still leaking.  Once leaking, always leaking, right?

So on the hour before the plumbers were to show up, I turned on the shower so they could see where the leak was.

No leak...

But when I flushed the toilet, water fell into the basement.  Talk about serendipidy!  It took a good 30 minutes for the 2 plumber guys and I to figure out where the water was coming from.  The water was leaking out around the air vent stack, not a water supply pipe. So:

1. There was a leak around the new roof flashing.
2.  The shower stall was leaking at the base where the tiles meet the fiberglass shower stall.
3.  There was a leak around a toilet or sink pipe.
4.  The toilet had a crack.
5.  The wax ring around the bottom of the toilet had dried and cracked.

The plumbers went for #1 because that wouldn't be their problem to fix.  And #2 for the same reason.  Now think about that.  They DIDN'T want a problem they could fix...  Don't they make money by solving problems?

So we all went into the basement to identify all the pipes.  OK, granted that I know the positions of the "equipment" upstairs, they couldn't figure out which pipes went to where.  Its understandable.  My builder's guys did some really weird stuff in the house, and I didn't know because I lived 60 miles away and only visited the construction site every 2 weeks.  And what would I know anyway?  I'd never seen a house being built.

It was #5 that was the problem.  On the VERY day before the plumbers came, the wax ring under the toilet had cracked and a gallon of water came out each time it was flushed.

It wasn't what they had been called to fix, but it was what was needed.  Sometimes, you just get lucky!  I'm not used to that kind of luck, but I'll take it when it comes...

In the next few days, I have contractors coming to look at replacing the crumbling 26 year old asphalt driveway and the 20 year old deck that I am beginning to think I will fall through.  And an electrician to hang a 17 pound fake Tiffany lamp over the stairs, add a lower stair lamp fixture, replace 2 smoke detectors, and fix a basement electric plug I can't make work. 

And THEN get someone out here to remove a ridge in the back yard that has aggravated me for 20 years (it was 5 years before I even really knew it was there because it was covered with thorny locust scrub trees that I spent 3 years killing).

So much stuff to catch up on, but this is the year I will do it.