Friday, January 24, 2014

Gratitude for frozen pipes.

This has been a brutal winter here in Pennsylvania.  After several years of relatively mild weather during the dark months of the year, nature is reminding us that she is unpredictable and wild still. 

Given that Hubbybunch and I heat our home exclusively with one hard-working Woodstock soapstone woodstove, trying to keep the house from freezing is a full-time job on days like today.  Unfortunately, our efforts to keep our pipes from freezing last night (turning the water off entirely and draining the pipes) backfired, and the damn supply pipe coming up from the well through the ground in the basement froze instead.  We had no running water whatsoever.  Not good. 

So, we rigged a space heater under a sleeping bag tent over that section of pipe, brought our coffee to the freezing cold basement, and watched it like a hawk so we wouldn't burn our house down.  It worked!  The pipe thawed, and flow was restored... mostly.  We have every faucet in the house dripping, and I'm home today and have been feeding the stove hourly to try to warm things up in here.  It may freeze again tonight when the temperature plummets to zero again.  But we'll deal with it as it comes.  The hot water pipe in our kitchen wall is still frozen, as it the cold water to the toilet in the adjacent powder room.

This sort of thing makes me want to hunt down the Johnny-homeowner who built that section of the house and smash his face in.  I suppose they decided that insulating the exterior walls wasn't that important.  They're completely hollow.  This spring/summer, we're going to have to rip open that entire side of the house, install insulation, and replace the siding.  We'd LOVE to get another small woodstove set up in there as well.  Where we'll find the cash for that kind of project I don't know.  But it has to happen before next winter, somehow. 

Regardless of the cold, the anxiety, and the interruption of our normally scheduled programming due to plumbing emergencies, we're surviving... and I don't regret this path we've chosen. This shitty little old broken house might be costing us a fortune in repairs and lost sleep, but it's OURS.  I'd rather be blow-drying my frozen pipes than dreaming up ways to murder a noisy, inconsiderate neighbor... or wishing with all my heart that I had just a little spot somewhere to plant some carrots.








2 comments:

luvsclassics said...

Hello, just finding your blog, in the year 2020 just after Christmas.
Was wondering if you are still working as a nurse.

luvsclassics said...

Ahh, we have had the same experience, bringing out the blow dryer to the storage shed where our furnace is located, on some unusually cold winters, looking back, it was in the year 2014.