Leaky Plumbing

Now that I finally got back into my blog, this is what happens! See those lovely cracks in the grout lines?

About a month or 2 ago, I started noticing some cracking. Lately it has been getting pretty bad and some of the tiles are sinking. I thought our house was sinking. Well, maybe it is, I don't know. 

Anyway, last week I got our water bill that was $330 more then the usual bill. This bill was for the 2 months of the summer that we cut way back on watering. Remember our dried out grass? You can see it here if you didn't see it before. We stopped watering the front, the kids only took showers once a week (we have a pool, it's not that gross) and I was washing dishes trailer style. 

When I got that water bill, I immediately called and told them something wasn't right. They scheduled someone to come out Monday morning and as soon as he opened up our meter it was spinning like crazy. Turns out we are using about 220 gallons of water a day.

After the water guy left, I called insurance. They started sending people out right away. The plumber said we have a raging slab leak and the whole house needs to be re-piped! Long story short fast forward to Friday, we have these drying machines that are drying the house out even though water is under ground. We have our water shut off except for a quick shower in the morning and flushing the toilets once a day. 

 Mr. C has a patient that I think owns Hobi plumbing so we called him. He sent a guy over that said we can re-route everything out of the slab instead of re-plumb the entire house. Oh my gosh! What a blessing. That is such wonderful news because insurance does not pay for plumbing, only the resulting damage.

Today, I got to have my water on while the plumbers found the direction of water flow and the leaks. That meant for me, I got a nice shower, a load of laundry done, some floors cleaned and my pool filled.

Since I can't really do any projects with this mess, well, I guess I could, but that would overwhelm me. I am going to blog about my mess and how this project goes. We are trying to be "Sewgreen" with this just like everything else in our house, so our first big dilemma is Pex or copper. We decided to go with Pex (Copper is 2x's as much) and have the water routed through the upstairs lines first so our shower water doesn't flow through Pex incase of any MTBE leaching. We have a really good filtration system for our drinking water in the kitchen, so we should be good. As far as green for the environment, hopefully this Pex will never come out of our house because it is not biodegradable and it is toxic if burned. I guess that is not so green. When you are looking at thousand's of dollars difference, you do have to sometimes look at the money involved.

There you have it, our beautiful mess these days.