Water - September, 2007

When you own a house, water is the bane of your existence. You need it where and when you want it. It needs to flow freely through your pipes, but not drip through your faucet. You want it in your sink, but not in your basement. You want it to fill your toilet tank and not cause corrosion and that annoying “the toilet is running” thing where just jiggling the handle really doesn’t solve the problem. You want it coming out cold from the icemaker, but you need to be vigilant for clumps, so make sure you work the thing every day, even when you don’t need ice. You run the dehumidifier in the summer and the humidifier in the winter, just to make sure your world is full of the right amount of moisture at all times.

You want the rain to flow gently into your gutters, not fighting with leaves or, God forbid, freezing on your roof in the winter, backing up into the phenomenon called “ice damming,” where it gets under the roof and freezes, only to melt and drip into your home through your sheetrock. Ah, but I am thinking ahead, aren’t I? And do I hear “gutter helmet” as a birthday gift?

Do I sound like I know far more about this issue than I should? Personal experiences aside, who among us hasn’t had a sump pump issue, water in the basement after a big storm, or a leaky pipe? If you have a pool, your issues are compounded by chemistry. Making it look like the pristine Caribbean doesn’t happen by chance. It’s a delicate balance between chlorine, alkaline and a host of other fatal-if-swallowed chemicals in white containers that confounds, confuses and bankrupts you. My formerly blue water today is pea green, despite the little robot guy sucking the crud off the bottom, and I haven’t even figured out how to heat the pool, no less cure it of this color transformation. So I have poured vats of chlorine into it, hit it with alkalinity rise (I confess I have no idea what that is) and followed all the chemical potions suggested by the pool guys. Apparently you even have to do something to “shock” the pool, which turns out to be adding a bunch of packages of more chemical stuff and not merely having me show up in a bathing suit, which I thought would surely be shocking enough. You have to get the pool closed for the winter and opened in the summer, and the same thing goes for the sprinkler system, which gets serviced twice a year. Let’s face it, if we took paid this much attention to our bodies, we’d all be in better shape.

But a leak doesn’t heal on its own. I can limp around for a while on a sore leg, knowing that eventually I’ll recover from whatever it is that ails me now, but the leak in my kitchen ceiling probably isn’t going to recover as quickly. The likely culprit, the shower above in the master bath, isn’t about to give way, but it also isn’t about to get better on its own. Exploratory surgery seems likely, followed by replacement parts and some cosmetic repairs. The house is only 20, but I guess “house years” apply, because at 20, I sure wasn’t leaking – yet.

So, yes, water is everywhere when you own a home, and, if you own a new home (new for you, but not necessarily new construction), it takes a while until you get to know each other well enough to identify your respective water issues. And, no, that is not a tear in my eye, it’s just a drip coming from…somewhere.