After my husband showered and left for work, I finally got up and went downstairs about 2 hours later. There staring at a very large puddle of water on my kitchen floor was our sweet golden retriever and three shelter-rescued cats. I scolded the dog and went for the mop.
While I mopped, the foursome continued to gaze at the mysterious puddle and then in unison, gazed upward. I too looked up and was shocked to see a huge bulge in the ceiling! There’s a small crack in the plaster and the ceiling is swollen and drippy. Yikes!
I quickly turned and ran to the laundry room to turn off the main water valve that serves the entire house. I turn off the ceiling light, and run upstairs and turn off both valves behind the two toilets upstairs. Why I did that, I don’t know, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I thought it might help stem the flow of water through pipes in the vicinity of the leaky ceiling. Then I call my husband at work and relay the bad news. I guarantee you his first words were NOT “Yikes”.
As he rushes home, I mop up the wet puddle, and already notice the dark stain embedded into the grain of the wood floor. Then I push the table and chairs into another room, and put two tarps from the garage down on the kitchen floor. I clear away the counter tops that are in danger of getting wet and put a plastic bucket on the tarp to catch the drips. Standing back, the drips now have a more distinct sound to them, adding to the insanity of this situation. I stand back a bit, fearful of standing too close to a possible bursting at the seams sort of incident. from that bulge in the ceiling!
When my husband arrives, he goes into action quickly. He brings in his work lights and plugs tit in so we have good visibility of the area in the kitchen. He drags in a big plastic pond we stored outside, but had not yet set into the ground. It was about 2 feet deep and 4 feet long. This gets placed directly under the swollen ceiling area and then we turn on the kitchen faucet and an upstairs bathroom faucet for just a few seconds to release any residual water pressure. We close those taps and now armed with a long pole and a garden spade, my husband begins to gently poke a small hole in the center of the swollen ceiling. A gush of water rushes out. All sorts of water that had been sitting there for who knows how long and as hubby widens the opening, the drippy water pushes out more and more debris too. Plaster, wood pieces, insulation, wall board chips, sawdust and dirt. Forty years of that stuff sprinkled down into the plastic pond and onto the blue tarps.
Working away at pieces of the ceiling and carefully tapping and pulling away sections of it, we soon had a 5 foot long hole that was about 3 feet wide in the kitchen ceiling. The leaking had stopped and we had a good view of the inside structure of the floor above us. And of course, everything was wet up there. We were careful of the exposed electrical wiring that ran along the beams and we could see right up into the foundation of the shower drain from the upstairs bathroom. My husband is sure the leak is from the joint that links to the shower faucet and feels sure he can get into that plumbing through the wall in the next room. He sets up a fan atop the refrigerator and with the heat from the warm work lights, we begin the process of drying out the exposed wet wood in that giant hole .
It takes a bit of work to clean up the tarps, carry out the big plastic pond and sweep up all the mess.
We aim one work lamp toward the dark stain on the floor, hoping we can lighten the damage there too.
I think this is going to take awhile.
The man of the house doesn’t wait long, and he’s upstairs, cutting a large rectangle-shaped hole out of the wall in the room on the other side of the shower. This cuts up the wallpaper too of course, and he shouts down, “Honey, start looking for some new wall paper!” With a big square-like hole on that wall, we turn the water back on for just a moment (moving the kitchen work lights and electric fan safely away of course) and watch what happens. Sure enough, there is a definite leak at the joint that leads to the shower faucet. Looks like it ‘s been dripping for awhile too, because everything around that area is wet too. I dig out another small electric fan
This means blowtorch time, and soon my husband has that ready to go too. He’s very familiar with this tool, so I would encourage only those with experience to fix a problem like this. Drying the joint, fluxing the joint, (opening a window first, of course) getting the pets safely into another room and finally soldering the joint to seal the leak; my husband dug right in to fix the problem.
The leak was relatively easy to repair, but the fans are still blowing into the kitchen ceiling and upstairs wall, trying to dry up all that wet wood. and I’ll be looking for wallpaper soon. But as for that dark stain on the wood floor, it has just about vanished.
