Thursday, March 12 - Friday, March 13: Mystery Solved

The Mystery of No Cold Water has been solved! I was working from home on Thursday, in the middle of a call, when a plumber called up to me from the attic stairs. "Let me ask you this," he said. "Do you have water in your garage?"

This is the kind of unhinged question one gets regularly when renovating a hundred-year-old house.

"Um, yes," I said. "But we've never used it."

"I think I've fixed your water," he announced, pride in his voice. He took out his phone and showed me a picture: a selection of pipes with a knob in the middle, taken from the dark recesses of our basement pantry. He gave a detailed explanation of how the pipes connected, what the knob did, why one of the pipes had been closed off and diverted, etc etc, but the overall point was that he turned the knob and now the water is cold where it should be.

HE TURNED THE KNOB.

We've been living in this house for five and half years with no cold water and all we had to do was TURN A KNOB?! 

It would be nice, truly, to have even a modicum of knowledge about household workings. Should Andrew or I have actually gone to trade school to be a plumber or electrician or carpenter? I wouldn't go that far. But isn't there a happy medium, even a happy low-medium, state of understanding that we should have acquired lo these many years of our lives? Shouldn't this low-medium skill level be required before signing the papers to buy a house that has "character"?

To be fair, the contractor told me the plumber's team had been running all over the house, searching for the solution to this mystery. For a while last week it seemed they might have to rip up the ceiling in the basement to find some pipes that were "behind the ducts." It seemed more than possible that the bathrooms upstairs would be ripped up. But no! No (extra) destruction was required. The plumber discovered this pipe setup, understood where each pipe led, turned the knob, and fixed it.

Andrew, still in Peru, didn't believe it. "The fact that it was so easy makes me think it's not actually fixed," he said doubtfully (and maybe hopefully; the urgent call to the contractor about no heat in the basement for a full weekend, only to be told it was because the thermostat was off, is still fresh in our minds). We will have to accept another round of embarrassment because that night I turned on all the "cold" faucets on the second floor--the girls' bathrooms and ours--and let them run. Cold water. The basement sink: cold water. I can't test the kitchen because there is no kitchen. I still have to test the hose faucet on the deck (because for 5.5 years I've been watering my outdoor plants with hot water) and I hope this, too, is now cold.

Cold water mystery resolved, on the project goes. The drywall is fully installed now and the kitchen looks like a room. The plaster guys will likely coming next week. We might come back from Iceland and have actual cabinets.