A Weird Week

It was hard to decide on a title for this post, since so much happened in a single week. We had a crazy weird snowfall, a power outage, and discovered water collecting in our basement. Regarding the last thing there, we've solved the mystery. I'll tell you at the end of this post. The pictures are too gross to share at the beginning. You can read along, and then I'll warn you when we're about the peg the gack-o-meter. Only you will know whether you want to proceed. Just know that the solution to the mystery only adds to the weirdness of a single week. I'm hoping the coming week will be less weird, but I'm afraid it will only get more weird before it gets better.

Okay, so let's start with sewing. It's a good place to start. First, I stitched up the next section of the Heartland Barns piece. I'm going to guesstimate I'm a little more than halfway across now.

The birdfeeders needed filling, and so I took a little walk around. It's one of the first days I've been able to walk around without fear of slipping and falling. Things are looking good despite the weird snowfall event. The tulips at the front door have bloomed. 

There are more tulips coming all around in different places. Sometimes the deer leave them alone. Turning around from where I stood, I could see the buds on the wisteria. This was a newbie last year, and so I worried the snow might have killed it.

Around the corner from the wisteria, the purple clematis still has flowers, and we're still awaiting their bloom.

That one was here when we moved into the house, and so it's used to our weather. I wasn't too worried about it. More worrisome was the red one around the corner. It had buds and greenery, and that all appears intact. 

Around the next corner, the bleeding heart actually has a flower. Despite being flattened by snow, it's still alive and blooming away. It made me think of Ukraine. Where there's a will, there's a way, and courage rules the day.

On the lower patio, the first bud has appeared on the poppy. The one on the upper patio still has no buds. I worry the squirrels will take a liking to it.

Moving on toward our hot tub, the blue clematis is still doing fine too. It also has a flower.

The peonies were all fine, and the largest among them has several buds. It will be quite a while before these open.

Beside their bed, the echinacea are poking their heads above ground. I worried about them too. They aren't particularly cold-weather hardy, and I've lost these due to cold weather in the past. I hope they continue to grow and thrive. It's looking hopeful for them.

Rounding the corner, this was quite a surprise. The stargazer lily made an appearance. 

And finally, the blueberries. I was quite worried about these, but they seem fine. They too have flower buds. We don't expect blueberries for at least a year or two more, but we need living plants first.

Okay, so with the birds fed, I could head back inside to the sewing room. I was planning to do laundry while I sewed, but then we were still worrying about the leak in our basement, and it didn't seem prudent to run a bunch of water through the pipes. And all of that to say I spent the rest of the day sewing. I'd left off with two rows finished.

The next rows included two of the larger cats, offset from one another, and so I needed to sew together three rows at a time.

When those were finished, I sewed them to the top two rows, and my quilt top was half finished.

While I was sewing the rows together, Sadie was making friends with the other cats in the room. She tells me they aren't much fun...a little flat and one-dimensional. Smitty is a much better confursationalist.

Okay, and then I had one more straight row to sew together...

before sewing another three rows at one time.

I was getting tired of sewing by then, and so I left it here. The top and bottom rows aren't sewn together yet. I'll finish off the last row before I sew the two halves to one another. 

Also, I decided to use the leftover small cats in a Quilts for Kids donation quilt. It will be a good use for them, and I already have out all my black and white scraps. I might even start on it right away. It's been quite a while since I donated a quilt to Quilts for Kids, and it's my favorite quilt charity. 

Okay, now we're getting to the gross part. Fair warning...the pictures you're about to see are hard to look at. From here, it's all about the leak. So we ran all kinds of experiments. It was confusing since we weren't sure if this was a plumbing leak, or ground water seeping in through the concrete foundation. Ours is a daylight basement, so there is the concrete slab of a floor, but there are also concrete foundation walls behind the interior walls. It could have been either, both, or neither. 

Mike was spending a lot of time vacuuming up water and drying the floor. Then, we'd run water somewhere and see if we got more seepage. We even put food coloring in one of our toilets and then flushed to see if we'd get red water. Nope. Our experiments only created more questions and confusion. Finally, toward the end of the day, Mike cut a hole about one-foot square in the wall of the guestroom where most of the water was leaking from. This was our first glimpse:

Gack! Ack! Ick! Gick! Gross! Strangely, it didn't have too bad an odor. We ruled out a sewage leak (thankfully). And so he continued cutting that section between the studs from floor to ceiling. At the very tippy top, we could see the culprit. You can see it too where I've indicated with an arrow. Those large pipes are not associated with the toilets (thankfully), but they are drain pipes from rooms upstairs. 

Running yet more experiments, we flushed toilets, turned on showers, ran some water in the washing machine, and then let it drain. As it turns out the water leaks only from the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink on the main level. It appears safe to run water anywhere else. And that also tells us that it's been mainly hand soap, dish soap, dishwasher soap, and bits of food. And what a slimy mess. There is about 2-3 inches of slime on the concrete slab behind the interior wall. Ick.

Okay, so the good news is that this will be covered by insurance. We'll only have to pay our deductible. The bad news is that this is a substantial clean-up and repair issue. We expect that at least one whole wall in the guestroom and around the corner into the family room will need to be removed and replaced. We can use water most everywhere in the house, but we can't drain anything from the kitchen or bathroom sinks, nor can we use the dishwasher. (Oh, the humanity!) We're hoping we'll be able to get the leak fixed fairly quickly. The rest of the work will take weeks. The rest of the good news is that this is all in a corner of the house we rarely use, and so it won't disrupt life too much while the repairs are being made.

We're trying to reach our insurance carrier this morning to give them the (for them) bad news. I'm hoping they'll send a plumber today, but there's really no way to know. In these weird pandemic times, things usually take much longer than expected. If anything good has come out of the pandemic for me, personally, I believe it has taught me to be more patient. And right now, I'm going to exercise those patience lessons on the next section of my slow-stitching. It's nice to have a solution to the mystery, even if the results linger on.