When It Rains, It Pours…

We can shower! We can flush!

Hallelujah!

Neither of those things was true last week. It was every bit as bad as it sounds. When you live in an old house (or really, any house), shit happens. More specifically, it bubbles up into your master shower.

Yup, it was a good week.

Listen to this rundown: three plumbers visits, two flat tires and a busted irrigation valve.

Sounds kinda like the tail end of the homeowner’s version of “12 days of Crapmas.” I’m still recovering from PTSD, pipe traumatic stress syndrome.

It started with the discovery of a mini pond that sprang up in our neighbor’s driveway. He’d just had some irrigation work done. We figured something went wrong. Poor guy. Turns out, something did go wrong — for us. It was our pipe. And then, a second busted pipe was discovered, naturally beneath a concrete slab.

There’s a long boring backstory — which I’ll spare you — that highlights how deep our unluckiness runs. These leaky pipes weren’t even our fault: It was part of a street “improvement” project instigated by the little random water company that has jurisdiction over the neighborhood. The work happened well past the warranty, which I discovered when I finally got someone to call me back. No homeowners’ insurance coverage, naturally. Blah, blah, blah. You know how this ends up: expensively! But $1,500 later (we were anticipating much worse), things were fixed.

Then the gurgling started.

The kitchen sink blorped every time the kids’ toilet flushed. Then No. 2 -— she of the sensitive shnozz — complained of a weird smell. Well, that was because everything started backing up into the master bathroom.

“Fast showers! No flushing!” my husband barked at the kids.

Plumber visit No. 3 turned out to be tree roots in the pipes.

Naturally that afternoon, the hub discovered not one but two flat tires. Oy.

And just when we thought we were finally done and so happy to have it be Friday, there was a knock on the door.

“You’re gonna have a big water bill,” the landscaper said, while he showed me where backed-up irrigation tubing and a busted valve had leaked so badly water seeped into our neighbor’s yard.

That got fixed, too. Whew.

Yesterday, I was walking down the hall when I heard a loud dripping sound. I snapped the light on in the kids’ bathroom and the faucet was leaking. Of course.

I’d say, “Calgon take me away!!” But honestly, I’m really scared to use the water now…