Well, it seems that we've run across a string of relatively expensive bad luck.
It started with the news that my car needed a water pump, and that pump would require the front end of the car to be removed and the engine torn apart to replace. $1200, plus the bleeder valve assembly which you can only get from a dealer is another $100 + labor if I don't do it myself.
On to the house. Now, I would suppose that this expensive string of difficulty could have started with the oven fire that brought us to replace the carpets and clean everything...however, I'll start new.
This week on Monday, Sandra informed me that the clothes washer had stopped working. It would only fill half way and then it wouldn't agitate because the water was too low. My response was "have the repairman take a look at this when he comes out to fix the dishwasher." I retired to guitar playing to forget about yet another broken appliance in my house.
An hour or so later, Sandra asks if I knew why the toilet upstairs wouldn't fill after flushing. I did not, but after looking at it I thought that the float assembly had a corroded switch and valve which caused it to stop working. She asked if those two could be related, to which I replied that I didn't see how they could be related, but anything was possible. I retired to the downstairs bathroom to get rid of a little water before bed.
Once down there, it looked like there was coffee grounds in the toilet bowl. "That's odd," I thought as I flushed them down. Lo and behold, the brown grounds were pouring into the bowl from the fresh water supply on the toilet. Now I was a little freaked out. I looked closely at it, and there were fine brown and yellow granules flowing into the toilet bowl. I went around the house, and sure enough, now every faucet in the house had sand coming through it. I had no idea what that could be, so we shut the water off and I went to buy some bottled water for the next day when we could get a plumber over.
The next day I called the city and asked if anyone else had an issue. The extremely helpful and super cool people at the city asked if we had a water softener, and if we could bypass it. I called Sandra and she bypassed the softener. She then ran the water clean. Booya! It wasn't a leaking main like I was now expecting. At any rate, the estimate for the softener, installed is $1100. To get one sized correctly for our family we will need one that is roughly $600 I figure, and then I'll have to sweat the pipes in myself. At this point, that just may be worth $500 to me.
Also, when turning off the water at the main I realized I could no longer put off replacing the main valve. The city was once again awesome to work with, they came out adn turned off the water and gave me a new meter that reports for itself wirelessly for the plumber. Plumber comes out and replaces the valve adn repairs my failed attempt at using compression fittings to replace the washer valve that was completely sealed by the softener garbage. $250.
I am coming to terms with the fact that I do not have a house. I have a large pit into which I have thrown my money for the past 8 years.
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