A Cascading Shower

This weekend was special for us in several different ways. It was our wedding anniversary, as well as our six month home ownership anniversary. Two very happy occasions for us, and two good reasons to celebrate. This weekend was also supposed to be the final days of us working on the half bath, and I was looking forward to unveiling the finished work on the blog this week. Well…that will have to wait, as we also had a very “special” moment happen this weekend. Where to begin?

Let’s start with Monday. MC and I both took the day off of work to celebrate our Anniversary, and I wanted to put those final touches on the sink, mainly the plumbing. Well, I had to run to the hardware store to pick up what I needed. I will note that I ran to Ace Hardware four (yes, four) different times because I kept getting the wrong stuff. By the fourth time, I was a bit frustrated and still didn’t have what I needed. Feeling extremely defeated, I decided to put it on hold and regroup, and clean up the living room since I had scattered my tools all over the place. At this same time, MC came over to help me clean up and noticed a small, but concentrated puddle of water on the floor under the chandelier in our living room.

We had thought that we  somehow spilled something, it was odd, but not overly odd. That was until I looked up and noticed a few bubbles in the paint on the ceiling nearby. We had water coming from upstairs…on our anniversary…oh happy day. MC ran upstairs as I stayed below, and she ran each bit of plumbing until we saw it, a cascading waterfall coming out of the chandelier. It seemed to happen when MC ran the sink in our bathroom, but to be safe, we decided not to run anything upstairs until we could get a plumber in.

Cut to: Tuesday. We had a plumber in at noon, and we told him about what we had discovered with the sink, but upon further review, he noticed it was actually the shower that seemed to be the problem. He said that the only way to really determine the problem would be to cut open the ceiling in the living room. Five minutes later we determined the cause and effect of the problem. As soon as he put his keyhole saw into the drywall, we knew the problem was going to be pretty big. It went in like a hot knife into butter. He cut out a section that was about 18″x18″, and as it fell to the ground, we saw a moldly black mass hit the ground.

About half of our ceiling has been getting soaked for who knows how long…and the reason…the drain pipe to the shower had detached, and was basically just floating in the ceiling. You could see a 1″ gap between the pipes, and our plumber showed us the shoddy craftsmanship that caused it. It really looked like this was poorly done, and the result was damaging. The plumber cut away some wood shims that were put in there to try to hold up this pipe, amongst other poorly installed objects (there was a piece of floor trim holding something up).

With it all cut away, he capped off the pipe and went out to the supply house to find what he needed. When he came back, he got it all hooked back up (properly), and told us that we should monitor it over the next week, just to make sure. As of this morning, there have been no more leaks, but now we need to find out the extent of the mold, remove more of our ceiling, and have it repaired. Not how we wanted to spend our anniversary, but hey, things could have been worse. At least we caught it when we did. No damage to the floors, and it seem the problem has been taken care of. Still…damage done.