Thursday, February 7, 2008

Maybe I'm fabric fasting for a reason

Turns out it's good I haven't been spending money on fabric lately. I came home from work yesterday to find the street dug up. One of my neighbors had to have their water line replaced. I sympathized, having been through complete sewer line replacement 8 years ago when I bought the house. Later that evening, I discover we have almost no water pressure.

I call the water company to report this, and they sent someone out who discovered that one of the street valves was still half off. He fixed this, but not my water pressure issue. I called again this morning (after having visited the coffee shop down the block, and its bathroom), and they came out again. The inspector turned off the water at the street, listened to the pipes and said, in that maddening way people have when they're about to tell you something really upsetting, "There's still water running in your pipes. Your line's shot too." Turns out when she inspected the work across the street the day before, there was a lot of water in the hole that wasn't from the line that was repaired. But no one thought to mention that to me or my neighbor, who it turns out has the same problem.

Panic-stricken phone call to plumber. Plumber visits by 11:30 a.m., confirms diagnosis. Says that while the work yesterday may have exacerbated my line issue, it's a 100 year old lead pipe and there's a good chance it was already failing, because my water pressure has never been fabulous. He's right, of course. And of course my homeowner's insurance doesn't pay for street piping. Of course.

I won't know until tomorrow what the damage is going to be. I'm hoping that by sharing the job with my neighbor we'll get some discount - at least we'll only need one permit from the city to open the street. That little piece of paper costs almost $700. I'm clinging to $5000 in the hopes that it will come in way under that and I'll be doing the dance of joy, but I don't know.

And we were planning to go back to Paris in the fall.

I love my old house. Just not very much right now.

1 comment:

Carolyn (Diary of a Sewing Fanatic) said...

I hope that everything works out well with the piping...I just can't imagine handling a situation like that!