Joys of Homeownership - Pt. 63
Category: Kitchen Sink...
Posted Saturday, July 23, 2005 at 09:20 AM [GMT-6]

I love early Saturday mornings during the summer. The neighborhood is quiet, except for the birds, and the muffled sound of a lawn-mowing overachiever in the distance. The air is calm and cool, and the sunlight sparkles enchantingly, reflecting off the water's surface in our garage.

Say what?!

Yep, that's what greeted us this morning as we prepared to leave for our long-standing tradition of Saturday morning breakfast with friends at IHOP. Our water heater had sprung a leak and the garage floor was beginning to puddle in front of the closet where the infernal contraption resided.

I hurried out to the water meter, grabbing a pair of leather gloves on the way out to ward off the hordes of black widows I knew would be defending their territory, pulled off the meter cover, frantically dug out the accumulation of leaves and insect carcasses covering the valve and rammed the long valve tool down...only to find that because of the angle, it didn't work. Great.

I ran back into the garage and grabbed my trusty channel-lock pliers. It took some serious contorting to get the right angle on the valve, but I was finally able to shut off the water supply, and apparently escaped without any fatal spider bites in the process, always a good thing in my book.

We're now waiting for the plumber to arrive to install a new heater. This is one of the drawbacks to living in Midland: the mineral content of our water apparently reacts like acid with the innards of heaters, and one feels fortunate to get three years of life out of a new unit. In our case, we didn't quite make 36 months. Of course, it was a warranty replacement for the previous unit, and so the warranty doesn't apply to the new replacement.

But, on the bright side -- and it's a very bright side, indeed -- we caught the leak early enough that there was no damage to anything. These things can be disastrous if the timing is wrong (OK, there is no right timing for a water heater leak, but you know what I mean).

So, it's still a beautiful morning. Especially now that the new lake in the garage is gone.