BOGGER!

Well, bugger really.
The crawl space under the house is a bit boggy hence the title of this post*.

The Old Girl alerted me to a plumbing problem yesterday when she moved a dresser in the spare room to expose a mouldy patch on the carpet next to the wall. The wall of this spare room is shared by the laundry wall which of course has complicated plumbing behind it. Running water could be heard behind this wall.

I went under the house to have a look. The dampness in the soil I'd noticed previously I'd put down to run-off from the back of the section as we've had some heavy rainfall recently. I'd planned in fact to crawl under the house this week to check if I could refit or add to the down-pipe connections.
When I reached the area of the leak - right up the back of the house and of course in the narrowest part of the crawl space - I could see water spraying out of the water couplings quite forcefully and up onto the floorboards. I lagged the joints with cloth to cut back the spray and leaks as much as possible and turned off the water at the mains. I e-mailed a plumber to call in the coming week. Given that it's usually 'Island Time' up here I might get a response sometime during the month of November. I'm hoping that I've identified the source of the leak and that some replacement couplings might do the job. I'm hoping that there's no leak in the piping behind the walls as this would be expensive to fix and would require dismantling the laundry wall.

Murphy's Law was really in action here with the leak being at the lowest point in the crawl space where you have to access by crawling on your belly and that we become aware of the problem on a holiday weekend when tradesmen are either unavailable or it would require another mortgage to call them out.

* We at The Curmudgeons Inc.ⓒ employ puns in our blog post titles to further amuse our readers.