Frozen Pipes = Flooded Basement

What a week we had! December 3 we noticed that the cold water in our kitchen stopped working. Talking to my dad we decided the pipes had frozen. So I spent an hour with the blow dryer trying to thaw them out, which ended up working. Yeah! My dad spent a couple hours on Saturday helping us find the source of the problem, which was this--The genius who built our house didn't insulate any of the pipes that were in the overhang of our house. So it was pretty much pipes, a piece of wood, then 2 degree air. N-e way, we insulated the pipes and hoped we had fixed the problem.

Tuesday night, the 8th, Josh and I were on our way to bed when we realized again that the water had stopped in the kitchen. We were up until 3am trying to defrost the pipes with the hair dryer, which didn't work. So we went to bed after turning the water off in case of a burst pipe. We woke up to no water in our entire house! What?! We went to the neighbors to get some buckets of water and they gave us a phone number of someone in the ward that could probably help us. He, Tyler, came over after work around 7. After surveying everything he called and lined up his plumber to come help us the next morning. Great. Still no water.

Thursday came and the plumber showed up at 7:30. Tyler came over as well and after 2 hours were able to determine where the pipes had frozen by punching some holes in our sheetrock. They hooked up a huge heater fan and built a tent on the back of our house to warm up all the pipes. Here are pictures of the tent and heater.

Tyler left while the plumber and I waited for the pipes to thaw out. One by one our water was turning on. We were down to one last pipe that went to the kitchen hot water. The plumber asked me to run downstairs to see if starting the dryer would help heat things up. As I got to the laundry room I heard a waterfall and saw water coming in everywhere. The plumber quickly turned the water off as we determined that the last pipe obviously thawed out and had burst. Fantastic. Luckily all the water was contained to the bathroom and laundry room so I could quickly sweep it down the drain.

The plumber started looking for the burst pipe. We ended up making a mess of our ceiling before finally finding it. (After Tyler saw what he did and knowing it was NOT necessary to do that to our ceiling b/c of how it was built, he was very angry at his plumber. Tyler and his brother are going to fix it for us to make up for that mistake of the plumber.)

Here's where he finally found the burst pipe:Within about 30 minutes he had the pipe replaced and the water was finally on for good! The only problem was that our house still didn't have any protection for our pipes since the geniuses who built the house put all the water pipes tightly against the cement of our house, so not only do we have a problem with the pipes in the overhang freezing, we have potential problems with all the pipes along the wall. No one had this problem before us b/c the basement was unfinished so there was warmer air inside to counteract the cold cement.

So the plumber left about 2:45 and you would like all would be well. Unfortunately, that only gave me about 3 hours to get the house ready for our friend Christmas party we were hosting at 6. I had to clean the house, set up all the tables, shower and get ready, bathe the kids and get them ready, and I had about 2 hours worth of work to do on the pipes to insulate them. Hmmm...not going to happen. To be continued in the next post...