Haunted House

This is going to be not at all knitting related but I wanted you all to know I hadn't abandoned the blog again.  I'm just busy cleaning up a giant mess.

You know how haunted houses on TV always seem to have blood oozing out of the walls?

photo courtesy of heyallyouzombies.com

Our house is doing that, except thankfully it's dripping water instead of blood.  But blood or water, I'm convinced the house knows my mother-in-law is no longer living here and it is Pissed!

It started with a roof leak in my room.  When it rains, it rains in my room.  When we first moved in here, we'd had a roofer come fix the leak and he'd said it would need to be recoated every two years or so.  Well, it's been two years so that leak is not totally unexpected.  A pain to deal with, but not totally unexpected.

Thankfully it finally stopped raining practically every single day and my room dried up.

But then we started finding water on the floor in the hallway.

And then water started pouring out of the office ceiling for absolutely no reason.  

And then water was dripping out of the laundry room door frame.  Not the ceiling, but the top of the door frame.

The next day, water began dripping out of the fuse box in the laundry room. 

And then it began pouring out of the crown molding in my daughter's room.

And then the water started oozing out of the laundry room walls.  Literally, oozing out of the middle of the wall. 

There's no plumbing behind or above any of those places.  I know what you are thinking.... The laundry room is the problem.  But the laundry room is on the second floor and its pipes run below it.  All the water pipes run through the flooring, not the ceilings on the second floor.

Where is all the water coming from??

And as haunted house water leaks go, because the water was running down the walls, not dripping from the ceilings (except in the office,) we couldn't put buckets under the drips to catch the water.  All that water made such a big mess!

We finally figured it out.  We figured it out after the laundry room ceiling and wall finally turned to pudding and fell on the floor with a big splat.

The a/c condensation pan/pipe/whatever was stopped up.  We got this thing where it's sort of like firing a shotgun into the pipe and it forces the clog out.  It sort of worked and we got some water to go through the line so we thought it was fixed.  

And then it started raining so I put the drip pans all around my room where the ceiling leaks and we all left the house to go run errands.  

Leaving was a mistake.  The house apparently didn't like that either!  We came home to a pseudo-swimming pool in my room and the upstairs hallway, and the water flowing down our stairwell looked like white water rapids.

Turns out, whoever installed the upstairs a/c unit failed to hook up the backup pipe.  The backup pipe takes over if the condensation drip pan gets full or stopped up.  Have I ever mentioned how humid it gets here in the summer?  It gets very, very humid.  And all that humidity was being turned into condensation which was running willy-nilly all throughout the space between the second floor ceiling and the attic flooring. 

We've got it rigged up so that all the water is now dripping into a 20 gallon bucket in our hallway.  We have to wait until everything up there in the ceiling dries enough to be able to get up there to make the necessary repairs.  Meanwhile, there is a steady stream of water pouring out of the ceiling into the bucket.  I bail the bucket out every few hours.  So far the lowest amount I've bailed in a day is 11 gallons and my high was 19.  

In other words, I'm too busy bailing to knit and I may be too busy to blog this week.  There is a LOT of clean-up that needs to happen here.