Frozen Pipe Adventure

Tuesday morning of last week, we woke to discover our pipes had frozen overnight. We spent most of the day trying, and failing, to sort things out on our own. When things still had not improved, my mother advised giving a call to her home teacher, Brother Steve Anderson, who is A) highly skilled and B) awesome.

Brother Anderson came over in the early evening to take a look. He was hoping he could get the water flowing himself. He and James went out to where our water main comes up into the front yard. By that time, it was dark, and bitterly cold. But they stayed out there, trying to manually heat up the pipe with a blowtorch. Still nothing.

At that point, Brother Anderson got in touch with a contact of his, who gave us some things to try, including stuffing a space heater into the hole in our front yard and letting it run overnight, in the hopes of warming the pipe enough to let water flow.

When Wednesday morning came and we still had no water, we ended up following the last resort recommendation of Steve and his friend, which was to hire a crew to come and attempt to thaw out our front yard and thereby, the frozen pipe. They weren't able to come until Wednesday afternoon. Needless to say, we were very grateful to my mother, who allowed us to shower at her house as well as use her kitchen to prepare food for our New Year's Eve party that night!

The crew arrived around 1:30pm and got set up. Basically they cleared the snow, laid heating coils across the lawn above the pipe, then spread insulating blankets over the top of it all. They left, and told us to call when we had water.

We were due at our friends' house at 4 for the start of the party. But at about 3:30pm, we heard a strange noise. In a panic, James found water flooding into the crawl space in our basement, and also some water spurting out from a panel behind our front door. Fortunately, James was able to quickly shut off the water. We pried off the panel, and found the leak, where a pipe had burst.

James called Brother Anderson, who said he would come an hour later. James insisted that I go to the party as planned, and he would meet me there once the pipe was taken care of. A couple of hours later, he arrived triumphant. Apparently the pipe had not been at all insulated, despite being separated from the outdoors only by the outer wall of the house. It is only a wonder that the pipes had not frozen before now!

Brother Anderson, amazing as he is, took care of the busted pipe, and advised James on how to finish the task, come spring. Water was restored!

...until the next morning, when we found it frozen over again. Boo! Fortunately, with the use of a space heater and an electric blanket, James had it thawed out again in about half an hour. Which was about when we discovered that the water from the crawl space had seeped out, soaking the carpets in our office closet and the corner of our family room. ARGH.

My scrapbooking supplies were the main casualties. I was in tears, but it certainly could have been much worse. In fact, of equal distress to me was the smell that soon permeated our basement--apparently the closet and/or the crawl space were home to a cat of our house's previous owner, because old cat urine spread with the flood. So gross. And then, when James tried to clean up the nastiness, it got onto his hands and resulted in ammonia burns.

Needless to say, it has been quite the week. Fortunately, we've got the carpets dry, clean and most of the odor is gone. Hopefully we will not suffer any lasting damage from this adventure. We are so grateful for Brother Anderson, for my parents, and for our Father in Heaven, who answers prayers!!