Our basement has a room I struggle to classify. We have a bedroom, a storeroom/office, a bathroom, a laundry room, a gathering room and the "other" room. The "other" room is a little room but it can make the difference between a good day and a bad day in a flash. It has been called everything from a boiler room to an HVAC room to a mechanical room to a furnace room. Or, in my case, it is the room with the furnace, AC, water heater, floor drain, hoses, filters and other stuff I don't know how to label. For the sake of this post I will simply call it the little room.
Recently, my husband asked me if I was the one who re-positioned the AC condensate drain hose so it stayed closer to the floor drain. I gave him an I-don't-know-the-meaning-of-any-words-you-just-said look. And if I did, the answer would be a "no" as I never go into the little room. I know how to open and close the door to the room but that is the extent of my expertise. After we eliminated the possibility of an otherworldly entity we determined the hose whisperer was one of our recent house guests who is mechanically inclined and likes to make things work a little better.
About a week later I decided it was time to introduce myself to our AC drain hose and check out the drainage situation. Indeed, the hose was stabilized over the drain and it was doing its thing properly as far as I could tell. However, something else caught my eye. There was a puddle of water surrounding our sixteen-year-old water heater and a little pool of water settling on the far side of the water heater. The little room being a foreign land to me, I thought it best to run the situation by my husband when he arrived for lunch. It did not take long for him to say, "We've got a problem. The water heater is leaking." And I said, "We've got a problem. It is Friday afternoon and you know what it is like to get help on a weekend."
As I resigned myself to a few days of paper dinnerware and cold showers, my husband was on the phone with his plumber buddy. The plumber graciously agreed to come right over and install a new heater if we could procure one. The next phone call solved that problem. The final hurdle was the need for one more pair of hands connected to a strong back so the heaters could be moved in and out of the basement. Bingo, my husband's nephew was available. All systems go.
Within a few hours we were the proud owners of a brand new water heater, thanks to the generosity of others. Those who agree to help someone out on the cusp of a weekend are folks who deserve high praise. Perhaps the one who really saved us from having a full basement flood was the hose whisperer. If it wasn't for him I would never have peeked into the little room and discovered the potential disaster.
All should be well but I reminded my husband that home equipment failures usually come in sets of three. Our dishwasher went out a few months ago, add that to the water heater and misfortune math says we have one to go. I ran the equipment replacement dates in my head and said, "Get the clothesline ready to go. The dryer is next."
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