Pipe Down Over There

Oh the adventures in Home Ownership... 

This adventure began on a random Monday night when I started telling Greg about the list of projects I had for my dad during his upcoming 36 hour visit.

Replace rusted outdoor light with motion-detector model
Spread mulch in front flower beds
Plant flowers in front flower beds
Fix leaky hose faucet
Figure out how to turn on over-head fluorescent lights in garage
Replace kitchen outlets with GFI outlets

On top of said list was to fix our leaky hose faucet. We had noticed the leak a few weeks prior, and via a through diagnosis with our resident plumber (a quick phone call with my dad) decided it was a join that needed to be tightened, re-saudered, taped, etc. (fill in any easy fix here).

So on this random Monday night, Greg and I decided why wait for my dad, when we  DIY wanna-bes could implement the necessary fix and get back to using our hose.

We started by peeling back the pipe insulation. Everything looked pretty normal. So I watched on the inside wall as Greg turned on the faucet. Expecting to see water leak from the joint nearest me, I stared as Greg said he was seeing the water outside. It took a few seconds for me to focus on the steady flow of water shooting from the middle of the pipe into our dry wall- not quite the easy fix we had expected.

We shut off the water and examined the culprit: a 2 cm bulging crack in our copper pipe.

Enter Exhibit A: The Aftermath of a Frozen Pipe

Feeling quite proud in our DIY diagnosis, we proceeded to remove the burst pipe section with the intention of heading to our neighborhood Home Depot to get a replacement piece. Everything seemed to be going DIY-perfect up until this point, but that was about to change.  Greg whipped out a pair of vice grips, and unscrewed the joint connected to the cracked sillcock. Boy was he met with quite the surprise: King Counties entire water supply geyser-ing into our garage.

Greg screamed, I screamed. We both looked at each other with wide eyes. What do we do? Call 911? Go ask our neighbor? Thankfully my level-headed husband instructed me to find the water shut off valve.

Lesson here: find out where your water shut-off is.

After two laps around the house in a soaking wet sweat shirt, with Greg plugging the pipe with his thumb, I was unable to find the coveted shut off. I returned to the garage with my fight-or-flight reflex in full gear. And as I approach Greg, I notice a red knob near the floor of the main pipe in our garage.

We briefly discussed our options and figured it must shut off the water to this section of the pipe which would stop our very own Western Washington Old Faithful.

Low and behold, 4 turns of the red knob and we are in business. Well, about 10 minutes of draining into a Tupperware later and we are in business. We had to get creative because of the location of the pipe... so we used a flexible cutting mat to re-direct water into the Tupperware.

Once things were relatively under control, we loaded up the Honda with our cracked pipe, wet sweat shirts and headed for Home Depot.