A Little Home Incident

This morning at about 2 am during one of my frequent middle of the night bathroom trips (thanks, little baby!), Luci seemed interested in drinking out of the sink. That's the norm for Oliver (our oldest cat) but Luci sticks to still water for the most part. In the effort of her medical condition, I turned on the faucet to a drip to "encourage" her drinking and headed back to bed.

While slowly waking this morning, I heard a drip and assumed it was the bathroom sink. After getting up and looking in there, there was no drip. Slightly confused but still half asleep so didn't think much of it. Then, I leaned down into the sink to wash my face and saw water behind the sink (we have a "raised" sink and the faucet sits behind it completely separate from the sink). There was water pooled all over the sink vanity! Apparently, the drip was so little, it either didn't drip from the faucet and ran back along the faucet towards the base of it or the slight opening of the faucet valve caused a leak from the head of the faucet (yet to be determined). So, I grabbed some towels and started mopping up the water on the vanity then checked underneath the vanity to see if any made it down there. There was some small puddling, so I started cleaning (Mike was also up at this point to help me in the clean up effort).

While on the floor cleaning the puddles a horrible thought occurred to me, "was that dripping sound I heard the water continuing downstairs?" I voiced this to Mike who immediately went down to check. Yup! That was the source of the dripping! I ran down to check out the damage. The water took the path of least resistance and was dripping through one of the recessed can lights onto the kitchen floor. We grabbed more towels and started cleaning that. I then went down to the basement and, sure enough, the water had made it all the way down there to puddle! Ugh! That's what 5 hours of very slowly dripping water can do! Big puddles on 3 levels.

The good news is that on our initial observation, very little damage was done. The paint behind our sink will need to be touched up a bit since some came off when we were toweling off the area (one of the down sides we've found of low-VOC paint is that it doesn't seem to be as "strong" as the high chemical stuff..it doesn't stand up to painters tape well nor water). We also may need to touch up a bit of paint on the ceiling around the light canister in the kitchen but won't know for sure until everything gets a chance to dry out. The hardwood floors in the kitchen didn't look warped and, well, our basement is used to seeing water anyway so no harm there. Whew! How "lucky" are we?!?!

Of course, I left for work and Mike will be doing more clean up so hopefully we won't find any more bad news.