Breathe in....

Following the latest indoor rain situation I took a few days off to breathe. Despite the distracting hype over Tropical Rainstorm Fay over the weekend - we managed to get someone out to check the hot water lines and install a new hot water tank. For reasons which will remain a complete mystery - our tank decided to bust at the seam. Our friendly neighborhood plumbing expert told us the only plausible explanation is that this was due to some manufacturer's defect that decided to rear its ugly head now after however many years the tank has been in the house. Thanks, tank.

Our friendly neighborhood plumbing expert charged us around $850 for the service call, tank removal, replacement, and hauling off -- so just in case you were erroneously assuming that hurricane-inflated prices have finally leveled off around here.... There it is.

I am choosing to be happy about two things this morning:

1. The tank did not erupt and take out a wall.
2. We had the 850 bucks to get it replaced.

As for the leak through the living room ceiling -- the water discolored the tape and popped the seam along three sheets of sheetrock. We won't need to do anything too dramatic. We'll probably have to retape and mud a bit before repainting the ceiling. However, we've decided to put off repainting the ceiling til some time in the future when we are ready to repaint ALL of the ceilings. During one of our quick inspections this week we realized that we now have four downstairs rooms with badly stained ceilings and we're sure that by the time we get around to painting them we'll have more. (If you read the blog you know that I'm not being pessimistic here.... Just planning realistically.) We're going to slap some paint over the stained tape in the living room in the meantime just so it isn't quite so .... uh... ugly? Not that mismatched ceiling paint won't be ugly -- but you'll have to look harder for the ugliness when it's all some shade of white, we hope.