The Dreaded Pipe Burst

After purchasing our humble duplex and spending significant $$ on new kitchens and new bathrooms, we finally moved into our new home.  Everything went well enough for the first few months.  As first time home-owners, we certainly had our share of annoying minor fixes.  I particularly remember wasting a frustratingly silly amount of time on constructing a small piece of fence on part of our porch.  None of the issues were, however, particularly threatening until…

We noticed after returning from Christmas vacation (one week with my family, one week with my wife’s family in Minnesota and western Kentucky, respectively) that the shower in the upstairs unit had ceased working.  I could turn the handle, but not so much as a trickle of water.  It was disconcerting that the new shower would break so soon.  We called the plumber who worked on our bathroom and asked him to take a look at it.  A few days passed and we were still waiting impatiently, as our first tenants were set to move into the upstairs unit the next week.  Then came the weather warning.  A wind chill of -20 degrees F was expected.  We were also worried that the pipes had frozen.  However, the piping was in an interior wall, making that scenario seem unlikely.  My wife, Courtney, suggested that we leave the faucets running at night, which can help prevent frozen pipes…  Idiot that I am, I persuaded her that we should just turn up the heat in the unit.

The next day Courtney was upstairs checking on the unit and waiting for the plumber.  I received a worried phone call at work informing me that now none of the faucets upstairs were working and the plumber was later than expected and hadn’t called.  Thirty minutes later Courtney heard the pipes burst.

A hot water line burst in the upstairs unit, meaning that it was cascading down into our unit through the light fixtures in the bathroom and also flooding the laundry room basement.  Fortunately, after a little scrambling she located and shut off the main water supply to the house.  By the time I arrived home, expecting two ruined kitchens and a ruined bathroom, the only water that remained was draining in the basement.  

We were very, very, very lucky that there was no lasting damage.  If this had happened anytime during the prior two weeks while we were traveling for Christmas and the duplex was empty, the water would have run until the water company shut it off for excessive usage.  It would definitely have ruined the kitchen and bathroom in our lower unit.  It might have also destroyed one wall of the upstairs kitchen.

For a first time homeowner, having a pipe burst is a terrifying experience.  During the next month my wife would have nightmares about waterfalls coming down through our bathroom ceiling.  Courtney would wake up around midnight and ask me to check the faucets.  Since we didn’t have a tenant yet, I would occasionally go upstairs and test the faucets and feel the temperature of the wall where the incident occurred.

Up next, the cause and how we fixed it.