1993: Cascading Problems

     I have been going through my 1993 diary, and it seemed that we had a lot of problems that year.  The particular run of problems I am writing about started in the middle of February in 1993, when a cold snap froze our waterline, and left us and three other families without water.  My neighbors and I hiked up to Sunbeam Creek daily after work and on weekends, trying to thaw out our 4,100 foot long waterline, without success.

    As I blogged last week, when Spring Break came along, we had already booked flights for Las Vegas and Los Angeles, so we left our frozen waterline behind and took off for our vacation, hoping that by the time we got back, the waterline would have thawed out on its own.  Sadly, when we returned home and anxiously turned on the water tap in the kitchen, we saw our waterline was still frozen.  It remained frozen for another month.  It wasn’t until a month later, on April 24th to be exact, that water finally started coming out of our taps.

    We were so happy and relieved at finally having water again, but we soon discovered that things weren’t exactly back to normal, because we had no hot water.  During our frozen water period, our hot water tank gave up the ghost.  

    “Oh well,” I thought, “I will just have to buy a new one. “  and put in an order for one from Sears, who delivered to McBride.

    Living where we did in a very rural setting, we lived the rural lifestyle; meaning we fixed our problems ourself,  Over the next few days, I began unhooking and removing the broken old hot water tank, and once it was out, I discovered something very depressing;  the wooden floor under the tank was punky and starting to rot.

    When I poked further around on the floor, I saw that the rot continued on under our shower stall which   was located beside the hot water tank.

    Yikes, I realized that I would have to tear out the shower, and then, since the hot water tank and shower together took up about half of the total bathroom floor, I figured that I might as well rip out and replace the whole floor of our tiny bathroom.  That meant also removing the toilet and bathroom sink vanity too.  

    By this time in my life, I was not totally surprised at how renovations, start cascading.  You begin thinking your will be fixing one problem, then you discover that before you can do that, you have to fix five other problems.  Sadly, I accepted my fate, and began work on our bathroom.

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