That is how my shower was this morning and, I am here to tell you, that is a great blessing!
It seems our hot water heater went out sometime Sunday afternoon. Monday morning my mom came over and we moved everything out of the laundry room (except for all the dust bunnies that have taken up residence there in the last five years or so since the last time I deep cleaned my laundry room. Hmmmm). We attached the garden hose to the water heater to drain it and went about our day. Soon the basement renter knocked on our door to tell us that it was raining in his apartment. Apparently the fitting on the end of the hose wasn't 'fitting' too well and some of the water was leaking and dripping into the basement. But, no worries, the floor below is tile and so nothing was getting hurt and it wasn't much water anyway.
After some time had passed and there was a big puddle around the other end of the hose outside, we proceeded to change out the heating element in hopes that we could avoid buying a new water heater. Ours is over 40 years old and still (until Sunday) in very good shape. They just don't make things like they used to anymore. Well, even with the help of WD40 we could not get the element to budge. I called Kevin to ask if he could run home and help us and then I left to run a quick errand. I knew the project might take awhile and, because our house was built by a contractor who did not think 'code' was important, we had to turn off all the power and water to the whole house to work on the water heater. When I returned I found both Mom and Kevin knee deep in water and the little bit of rain that the renter was experiencing inside his house had now turned into a full-on torrent. Giant bins were lined up to catch the water that was literally pouring from his ceiling. Upstairs, every towel we owned was dripping and still the water was gushing from the water heater. It is an 82 gallon tank but I measured no less than 117 gallons of water in my laundry room yesterday!
Ten hours, 39 towels and half a dozen wet blankets later we finally had the room dried up, the water heater flushed out and a new element installed. Now we would just have to wait. Since we had a city-wide power outage last night that lasted for seven hours, it took a little while to find out if the new element and the prayers we said over it had done the trick.
I am happy to report it worked. And I am now on my third dishwasher full of dishes and my fourth load of towels in the wash. Almost done.
