The "Money Pit" Moment

When we bought this old house a lot of friends called it "the money pit" and rolled their eyes and wrung their hands, certain we'd made a horrible mistake. Everyone recalled scenes from the old Tom Hanks / Shelley Long movie, where the wiring sparks, the plumbing leaks, and people fall through the floor.

So far, it hasn't been like that at all. Two years on, we're still happy with the way things are going.

But then this happens.

In demolishing the 3rd-floor bathroom, we removed all the old plumbing fixtures and threw them out. (Really, who wants to reuse an old toilet, even if it is in good condition?) We turned off the water, obviously, plugged up the open drain pipes, and tied-off the electrical wires. No worries.

Until you wake up the next morning and find the ceiling in the room below looks like this. Uh, whoops. The dining room ceiling is wallpapered (ceiling papered?) and the paper had all started to peel away and sag, as you can see. Clearly, the water in the bathroom hadn't really been shut off.

Turns out there was a pre-existing leak in the bathroom pipes, and closing the shutoff valves had reopened the old wound, so to speak. A slow drip had run back along the pipes to a low spot, then dripped through the floor/ceiling into the dining room below. This had all happened before, in precisely the same spot. The same wallpaper had peeled away from the same spot and been re-pasted, and the same pipes had an old patch clamped over them. Someone had even cut an access hole into the back wall of an adjoining closet just to get at this section of plumbing. All of which should have been a red flag to me, but I naively assumed the old fix had worked. Uh, that's a negative, Houston.

Seeing the damp wallpaper hanging limply from the ceiling I couldn't help but think of Tom and Shelley. Well, at least the wiring doesn't spark.