Good Intentions

What's the saying, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions?" Well I guess I know which road I am headed down, because I seem to have a LOT of good intentions!

This one was just the latest.



About a month or so ago I bought this dumb little $5 duck at Wal-Mart to put on the faucet of the bathtub in the kids bathroom. Keric had started playing with the faucet and pulling the little knob up and turning the shower on, so I thought I had found a cheap way to "fix" my problem, plus I thought it was kinda cute.

When Cameron and Reagan were here and would shower, they would turn the duck upside down so they could get to the little knob thing. I originally thought that the little fireman's hat was there so that you could lift it up and pull the knob, but it wasn't. So they would shower, and then when Keric would take his bath, I would turn the duck back around.

About the time that I had my surgery Chris noticed some water damage in our ceiling. It was in a weird place though. It was above the stairs and almost in the living room. Not a real logical place. Chris thought it was a leak in the roof, but I was up on the roof with him when he replaced it, and I knew there was no way there was a place where that thing could leak, unless it was a spot that I did. By the end of the day however the water in the ceiling had seemed to dry up and it didn't look like it was a problem anymore.

I didn't think too much about it again until a couple weeks later when Reagan came downstairs for breakfast and said that the ceiling had water coming out of it. Sure enough, there was water in the same place, except this time the water really was dripping out. So we cleaned it up and Chris called a plumber.

I watched the leak all day long and it seemed to have dried up again. It only leaked in the morning, and we had been having lots of snow/rain that day, so I knew it couldn't be the roof.

Chris called me from work to tell me that the plumber would be coming later in the afternoon, and that he would be coming home early to meet with him. He asked me if I thought there was any way that the leak could be related to the duck. I thought he was crazy. How in the world could that leak have anything to do with the duck?!? He told me his theory and said the only common thing he could find between when the leaks happened and when they didn't was the duck. I was sure the plumber would have a better explanation than that!

So that afternoon the plumber came over and Chris mentioned his duck theory to him. Sure enough the plumber tells Chris that he is probably right and that what we needed to do was get rid of the duck, and wait a couple weeks and see if the leak stopped. After the plumber left I told Chris that the guy was nuts! I told him he would have never come up with that theory on his own, and he just told us that it was the duck because he didn't want to do any investigating! I was pretty ticked off that we had even bothered calling him. Thankfully he didn't charge us!

Well...if you know my husband you know two things. 1. He fully believes that if someone else is able to do something, he himself can do some research and learn how to do it also. Thus the reason he did the roof himself, is doing the basement himself, and does any and all other household repairs himself. The fact that he called a plumber about shocked me to death! 2. He is all about FACTS! He isn't going to believe something unless it can and is proven to him. So waiting two weeks to see if the leak dried up was not a good enough answer for him. He wanted to know what the cause was.

So that's what he did. He started taking the fixtures off the bathtub and looking for water behind them. No water. Then he decided to get out the big guns...the saws. I tried not to freak out too badly, but I wanted to cry when I saw him cut a hole in the wall, and then he cut two and then there were three! Granted they are very nicely cut holes, but they are HOLES!




He did some checking and feeling around inside the walls and found out that the sheet rock was pretty much soaked thus meaning the leak was definitely coming from the bathroom, and not the roof. Of course he still didn't have the answer he was looking for, because now that he knew where it was coming from he still needed to know how it had/was happening.

He did a whole bunch of experimenting with filling the bathtub, and draining this and doing that, but nothing seemed to be producing any sort of a "leak".

He put the duck back on the faucet and tested a few more things, and then took it off and tested some more things. He turned it upside down, like the kids do in the morning, and still...we could not see or understand where there was enough water coming out of the duck to cause this much water damage.

So he had about given up and decided maybe the waiting two weeks and seeing what happened was not such a bad idea.

Just about that time Chris headed downstairs. I was in the bathroom and the duck was still turned over, the water still running. That's when he realized that his theory was right! He saw tons of water coming down the inside of the walls through the holes he had just cut!

I hurried and turned the water off and then we both just kinda sat there totally dumb founded! What in the world had happened!?!

Well...I guess what was happening was the duck being turned over was forcing water back through the faucet and it had no where to go except for down the walls and into the ceiling!

That STUPID duck has now cost me way more than $5! So needless to say the duck is gone, never to return and we haven't had any more leaks since then!