Bob Vila, I'm not. Tim "The Toolman" Taylor...that's closer to the truth. My luck comes in one variety and that's "bad". This past month was filled with an unusual amount of freakish occurances around the house, putting my limited home repair skills to the test. This is part one.
I was at work on a Friday night about three weeks ago. The ten o'clock news had just finished when my cell phone rang. It was my wife. "We've got problems." She said. She had just gotten home from work and discovered various messages from our neighbors informing us that a pipe behind our garage had burst and flooded our side and back yard. They noticed the flooding around 5 pm that evening and turned our water off via the water meter on the street.
"How did it burst?" I asked. I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around the situation.
"It looks like one of the roof tiles fell and broke it." Diane replied.
"A roof tile fell and ruptured a pipe buried three feet underground??!!" Give me a break. I was tired.
"No, there's a pipe coming out of the back of the garage and there's a chunk missing from it."
Great. "Well, do you see a tile on the ground?" I asked as I helplessly tried to assess the situation.
"Ummm, oh yeah...there's a tile right over here!"
That's just great. That's just friggin' fantastic. Out of all the stinking tiles on my roof, what are the odds of one of them falling off and breaking a 3" piece of pipe? When my luck is involved in the equation, pretty high.
I was stuck at work, which made things worse because I was powerless to do anything about it at that moment. If we had to bring in a plumber on a Saturday it was going to be expensive. Hopefully it would be easy to fix. Finally, my bad luck ran out.
Here's what I found when I finally returned home to check things out:
A roof tile had indeed fallen off the roof and ruptured the pipe. The pipe was plastic pvc piping and took all of 30 minutes and less than $20 bucks to replace. Thank God.
Now I'm waiting for my water bill.
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