We needed to turn off the water and call a plumber.
Have you ever tried to get a plumber on the Friday after Thanksgiving? After getting no answer and leaving a message with the two plumbers I knew, I decided to check out Angie's list. I looked up the A-rated plumbers that serviced my area and phoned the top four. I left messages for three and made an appointment with the fourth one for the following day.
One of the three I'd left messages for called back on Saturday but I didn't make an appointment because I had a Saturday appointment with the first one who answered. The appointment wasn't until 4 PM, but that was okay. Two of them never called back at all.
In the meantime we were leaving the water shut off. We turned it on from time to time to take showers, flush toilets and clean up the kitchen. A bit of a pain, but by that time we'd cleared the closet under the stairs and the closet in the downstairs bathroom so we could access the crawl space. It was wet. Muddy. A complete mess. But after a day of the water being shut off, a good bit of it had drained off.
At 4 PM on Saturday plumber number 1 showed up. A nice kid. Very personable, but not the master plumber and unable to find the source of the leak. He was all set to charge us zero since he wasn't able to help us but when he called the office to find out what to do next, he was ordered to charge us for a service call. I was sort of okay with that but then I found out what the next step was - it was wait until the following Friday for the boss (the master plumber) to come out with some high-tech and no doubt very expensive equipment to "listen" and pinpoint the location of the leak.
We weren't happy that they were suggesting that we wait almost an entire week. And it bothered me that they were only going to "locate" the problem and no mention was made of when they might get around to fixing it. But by this time it was after 5 PM on a Saturday. It wasn't like I had a lot of choices.
By Sunday, Mark had pinpointed the problem. About 10 feet of original (66 year old) galvanized steel pipe fresh water supply line that he calculated had split. We figured there was no need to pinpoint the location. It would all have to be replaced. I called the plumber who was supposed to come to locate the problem to let him know that it didn't need to be located because it all just needed to be replaced. We wanted to know if the job could be started sooner. Bottom line - he never called back - at least not until Friday morning when he wanted to confirm the appointment and by that time I no longer needed him.
Next step was to ask my Facebook friends if they knew any plumbers. One friend sent me two names. Both called back. One came out that same (Monday) afternoon and the other one told me he had no availability for at least a week. I suspect the one that did come didn't really want to do it because the quote he gave me was quite high. About $3000 more than the company we ended up going with. And of course, he couldn't start on the job for two weeks, but I still owed him a $75 service call. He knew before he came that I had limited access to water. Why did he bother to come at all knowing he couldn't do the job for two weeks?
But by then it was late Monday afternoon, I still had no water (for the most part) and I still needed a plumber. Next step was to login to HomeAdvisor. If you've never used it, you just enter your address and the nature of your "project" and it puts you in touch with three contractors. Two of the three phoned me. I explained the problem and made appointments for the following day. So on Tuesday I got to pay out another $150 in service calls but at least one of the companies was able to start on it the very next day.
They dug the trenches on Wednesday, replaced the pipe on Thursday, and filled in the trenches on Friday. Put it all back together and you can't even tell they were there. Fabulous!
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