Water, water, all around. (Or, why it was raining in the garage.)

Sunday morning. A rare opportunity to sleep in. I woke up from a dream in which I was searching for a bathroom. You all know what that means, right? I stumbled to the bathroom, did my thing, and headed back to bed. I only got a few steps because the toilet was making a whistling sound. Darn, I was SOOOO looking forward to sleeping in.

I knew this whistling sound from experience, the cistern that supplies our water was empty. We don't have a well, we have an underground spring, which is captured in a cistern up on the hillside opposite the house. The cistern is higher than the house, so our water pressure is supplied by gravity. It is a sweet setup. That is, unless someone leaves a water hose running overnight. It happened a few times this summer, which is why I knew the whistling sound.

Still in my PJs, I put on my mud boots and headed outside. I was going to turn off the hose and go back to bed. Peculiarly, the hose wasn't on. I opened the hatch to the crawlspace under the house and cocked my ear. Nope, no sound of running water (as from a broken pipe, which also happened this summer). OK, where else do we have pipes? The garage.

In the summer of '05, we had a young couple living in the apartment above the garage, and they installed a water line from the house to the garage. Predictably it froze in the winter, and in the spring of '06, there was a tiny crack seeping water onto the garage floor. I patched it with silicone tape and went on with life. Well, this lucky Sunday is when the pipes really cracked, and it was raining in the garage.

One of our winterizing tasks was to crawl under the house and turn off the water to the garage so it would not freeze again. Now seemed like a good time. Christie volunteered to do the crawling, bless her sweet, angelic heart! From deep under the house, she called out "Which valve do I close?" I told her it was the one on the line to the garage. She called back "There isn't one."

I'm trying to keep this blog family friendly, so I won't repeat what I said next, or about whom. What it came down to was that the only way to shut off the garage was to shut off the main valve. Nice.

Home Depot here I come. Christie went back to bed and I drove to town. I got a 3/4" valve and PVC cement, then headed home. The 3/4" valve did not fit the 3/4" pipe. This is when I learned that there is a difference between CPVC and PVC. I bought the wrong thing.

Fast forward to 9PM, we finally have the right parts to install a valve, so we turned off the main valve and put in the new valve. The PVC cement needed 2 hours to cure, so we left the water off overnight. This morning we turned the water back on and everything looks good, no leaks.

It is currently raining outside the garage, but I'm told that is normal.