Water, Water Everywhere

"Thank you for your prompt payment, as always," said the chap in the plumbers when I went to pay my bill recently after we had had some new taps and a shower installed. It occurred to us both that I had become something of a regular customer.  "I don't know why," I said, "but everywhere I've lived I have had water cascading through the ceiling at one point or another. Perhaps I ought to move to a bungalow."

Looking back to when I lived with my parents, I can never recall any drama with the plumbing beyond the odd dripping tap. As soon as I married and owned property however, it appears that rarely a month has passed without some sort of water related emergency, or if not emergency, some sort of incident that requires the visit of a plumber.

When I married June our house had no central heating, something we addressed pretty quickly by having it installed, and at the same time we had the bathroom brought into the twentieth century, which included a new bath, toilet and shower. Not long afterwards we were awoken around dawn by a loud bang and the sound of water pouring from a burst pipe. Cue dash to turn water off at mains and frantic phone call to plumber. The first time someone used the shower water poured down the wall in the lounge. This taught me a valuable lesson (obviously unknown to our plumber), that when applying mastic around a bath tub, it is preferable to do so with the bath full of water. If you do so when the bath is empty, filling the bath causes the mastic to stretch and crack and for gaps to appear so that when you use the shower, water runs down the tiles, through the crack, down the wall and into the room below.

We moved house and it was while we lived there that June died, consequently I spent little time at the house, moving back with my parents for a while. On one of my occasional visits to the house I went into the dining room and noticed a water stain on the ceiling. Venturing upstairs, I found that the tank was leaking and the carpet in the back bedroom was saturated. I phoned a plumber I found in the Yellow Pages. Someone turned up; I hesitate to call him a plumber as he had no tools of any description. I lent him a torch and a screwdriver (with which he picked in a fairly haphazard manner at the jacket round the boiler). He said he would have to go away and call back with a quote for the work. An hour passed, at which point I correctly deduced that he would not be calling back, so I plucked another plumber's number from the directory and was rewarded by the visit of someone who not only had tools, but knew what they were doing.

Even Mario has his own tools, my plumber didn't!

Having remarried, that house was sold, and with Val, I moved into another property. At this property the boiler gave up the ghost and had to be replaced by our now regular and reliable plumbers. Except, when they put in the new boiler they failed to tighten one bolt adequately, and guess what? Water through the ceiling. Still, that was fairly easily sorted. Then we had the kitchen gutted and new units and appliances installed. All went well until one Sunday morning when rainwater began bucketing through the ceiling. The workmen went up on the flat roof of the extension where the kitchen was but could find nothing amiss. That night, in the teeth of a gale, there was a loud crash that upon investigation turned out to be a drainpipe detaching itself from the wall. The cast iron pipe had corroded so badly that at the point where it met the roof there was a gaping hole through which water was pouring.  That was fixed, but shortly afterwards (and for not the only time at that property) we could smell gas. This turned out to be a poor connection to the gas hob, which was easily rectified but just as well it was done quickly otherwise the consequences could have been catastrophic.

We then moved to a house that was, when we bought it, only two years old. Now you would think, or at least you would hope, that plumbing problems would be some time in the future. Unfortunately it was only a few years after moving in that I noticed a water stain on the kitchen ceiling, immediately underneath the shower in the en suite bathroom. Tentative investigations could not identify the source of the leak and on the basis that leaks don't get better on their own, we got someone in to rip out the shower and remodel the bathroom. Since then we have had intermittent leaks from the same source and have had a whole army of plumbers traipsing through the house without being able to definitively identify the source of the problem. Even now there is the occasional drip.

Been there, seen it and if there were a t-shirt, I would have it.

New builds being what they are (lowest cost, lowest common denominator) our house has, in the fifteen years we have lived here, required a new fence (wooden fence posts rot), a new conservatory and a new central heating boiler along with the remodelled en suite. One year the boiler went progressively more and more wrong over a period of a few months, culminating in a complete failure just before Christmas. What an interesting Christmas that was, huddling round the gas fire in the lounge for warmth and bathing in a couple of inches of water decanted from kettles into the tub.

I have concluded that while hot and cold running water is for most people an amenity that can be taken for granted, it is something that I can never have total faith in. As often as not the running water in my house is not confined to the places it should be and is determined to run through ceilings, down walls and over floors. I have further concluded that when I left school nearly forty years ago and with no clear idea of what I wanted to do (hence my drifting into banking and staying there more through inertia than anything else), I really ought to have got into plumbing. I probably would have earned at least as much as I did in the bank (almost certainly more) and my goodness it would have saved me a bob or two!