House of Cards

That's what I call our condo. Every time you try to fix something, you have to worry about 6 other things breaking. Much like a house of cards, where if you remove one card, you have to worry about the whole thing falling  

We've been having some plumbing problems before we left, so I became concerned abut a water leak while we were gone. I read it's a good idea to turn off the main water supply to your house while on vacation to prevent some kind of leak while you are away. Made sense to me. Of course, we don't have an individual water supply. We have one big one for the building. 

I did the next best thing, turned off the valves to each sink. Due to our recent dishwasher and ice maker issues, we have new valves under the kitchen sink.

The bathroom valves are older. I turned off the toilet and sink and immediately worried that touching the valve would end up breaking it because of my house of cards theory. 

I was paranoid the first few days of vacation about a water leak. I didn't hear anything, so I thought we were ok. Not so much. Yesterday Shannon got an email from our downstairs neighbors saying there was water coming through our ceiling. 

We are of course in Barcelona and couldn't do much about it. We woke Julie up at 4 am to see if she could go check on it. Of course, she didn't have keys to our unit. We borrowed them from her and never gave them back. Ek did have our keys, we gave him the spare set once, and forgot to get them back. 

Julie got with the property management company and got into our condo. Saw the valve for the bathroom sink was dripping and clearly had been for some time. House of cards in action. Our property manager got a plumber lined up. We thought that would be Thursday because you have to shut off water to the whole building to do any plumbing work. Ek went over at lunch to survey the water  damage and try to dry things out. Julie and Ek also alternated emptying the pan underneath the valve that was catching the leak. 

Somehow the property manager got the plumber over last night and he could fix the leak without turning off the main water supply. So the source is contained. 

We are not sure how bad the water damage is. Hopefully the vanity took most of the damage and we can replace that. Obviously some water leaked to our neighbors below. No idea how bad that is. 

We spent most of yesterday freaking out trying to figure out how to manage the situation from across the ocean. We are so lucky for the help from Julie, Ek, and Liz from the property management company. Ron will be there tomorrow to survey the damage. We will be there....I don't know. Not today. Maybe Sunday, as scheduled, maybe early. We owe a lot of people big time. We are lucky to have good friends.