It could have been worse...

Last night at 10:20 I was lying just-asleep in Peter's bed (he was impossible to put down last night; grandparents plus SPRING plus Easter candy are making him a wild man!) and I heard a noise. It sounded like the whisper of rain falling, plus drips as if off a roof onto something resonant. I thought, oh great, the Easter tablecloth is on the drying rack on the porch, then I thought, wait a second, it was a gorgeous day with no clouds and we weren't expecting rain, and woke up.

The noise was coming from the adjacent downstairs bathroom, where water was dripping down through the ceiling vent fan onto the floor. There was an audible "pssssh" somewhere above the ceiling. I put down the bath mat and went upstairs, where Michael was still awake. There was no overflowing toilet or bathtub disaster up there, so when we went back downstairs it dawned on us pretty quickly what was up.

When the upstairs was plumbed - some time in the early 1990s, I think - they used polybutylene pipe, which was common at the time but is now considered bad, prone to rupture. And ours did.

Michael threw on some shoes and ran down to the crawl space to try and turn the water off. He was only able to find one valve, which oddly shut off most but not all of the water. We found that a small amount still comes out of the taps, and when you turn the bathroom sink tap to on, the "psssh" returns above the ceiling. We used this to locate the break itself - there's a pop-up in the (dropped) ceiling and Michael was just tall enough to see (I wasn't).

So this morning we're not using water, and Michael is going to investigate under the house and try to see if he can shut off just the water going to the second floor (we cold live easily for months with no water up there.) The bathroom fan switch is taped to off so nobody get electrocuted while it dries. And we need some re-plumbing.

It could have been much worse. Less than a gallon of water came through the fan over 20 minutes or so, and the ceiling of the bathroom seems unharmed. Michael said some water was dripping in the basement. But if I'd been upstairs, the leak could have gone for 8-9 hours, and we might have awoken to find the ceiling on the floor.