Leaks

I actually got the inspiration for today's post while I was travelling to college on the bus. I think about quite a lot on my bus jouney too and from college everyday, possibly why it's one of the few times I'm considered to be 'quiet' - especially in the mornings it irritates me a little bit if someone I know comes and sits next to me and starts regailing all their problems. I consider my journey in the morning to still be 'me' time, and afterwards I feel bad for not being conversational, one because I find it hard to make conversation when I'm still waking up, and two because I feel I really should have made the effort even if I didn't feel like it. Anyway, this isn't what this post was about.

On Friday night as I sat watching Top Gear of the pops (comic relief) in the lounge, stretched out on the sofa. After about ten minutes however, I felt this 'ticking' sensation, but thought nothing of it - it felt as though it was just the leather of the sofa moving about as it does, so I ignored it. Until it became such that I couldn't. So me being me, I looked behind me, the irrational fear popping into my head of 'what if it's a spider struggling to free itself from where I've crushed it?' alright, laugh, but these sorts of stupid thoughts often pop into my head.

But no, I discover as I move, that my back feels cold... and very wet. My only reaction to this is to look upwards, only to receive a large, slightly warm drop smack bang between the eyes. Yuck.

So the ceiling is leaking, and I have no idea where it's coming from. Then my brain begins to work and I puzzle it through something like this...

The water was warm
The bathroom and my bedroom are above the lounge
I remember when Blythe left the sink tap running and it dripping through into the lounge

It's the hot water tank.

So, moving the sofa out of the way of the dripping (a mighty task for a small lass like myself) and retrieving the mop bucket from the kitchen to catch the drops, I run upstairs to investigate. Lo and behold I also discover the reason for that 'damp, hot varnished wood' aroma that I had been smelling as I walked to and from the office all evening. I remember experiencing it once before when the roof leaked all those years ago, and it was slightly worrying, but I hadn't thought anything of it until now. Anyway, inspecting the water tank, I saw that the neutraliser had completely filled to the brim with rusty, manky water, and that the towels we store in there to keep them warm were completely soaked.

By now I was starting to panic. How long had this been going on for? How bad was it? And most importantly How the hell was I supposed to fix it?

As usual, mum was out, so I tried to get hold of her. This made me merely angry at the time, and apologies to all who were on the receiving end of my panic, because when I look back at it now I didn't react well to the fact that even after ringing her mobile no less than five times, and Craig's house number at least four, I realised I wasn't going to get through. Typical - this is after I had been reassured 'if you ever need me, I'm just a phonecall away'. Which as I discovered, is not true. Alright, fair enough I accept that at Craig's house there might be no mobile signal, but to not answer a house phone on the basis that 'it doesn't ring' is just plain pathetic. So there's me, stuck in this house with what has now grown to a steady stream of water running from a crack in the ceiling, my younger sister and nobody else to help me.

I figured there wasn't much else I could do but to protect the room from the wrath of the leak, so scouting out some dry towels, I packed them around the bottom of the tank, draped them over the back of the sofa (to stop the drips from splashing onto it) and around on the carpet. And that was about it. My plan sort of worked because after about twenty minutes, the leak slowed to a steady drip again, but by morning mum had come home and as far as I was concerned it was her problem now.

So Saturday passed uneventfully, she called a 'man' in for sometime this week, while turning the heating up and draining the hot water tank. After a while when the leak stopped, she turned the hot water back on and everything seemed a-ok, or at least I thought it did.

This morning, I wandered bleary eyed downstairs to be greeted by a strange, sloppy splashing noise. Uttering some sort of expletive I peered cautiously into the lounge to discover that the bucket had overflowed. Ok, bad, but not very much so as I wandered in to empty it. Yuck - as I took one step into the room my socks were instantly soaked, and looking around I could see that half the room was a mess of wet carpet, the back of the sofa had 'splash stains' and that the foot rest had left a nice brown skid where the wood colour had leaked into the lovely cream carpet, which had now become a fetching shade of grey. Emptying the bucket, defeated, I did the usual towels trick and told Blythe to phone mum and tell her what happened. I then promptly caught the bus.

I think the moral of the story is that you should never neglect anything. It'll hold for so long, but there's only so much anything, or indeed anyone can take. Read what you will into this.