A (small) Christmas flood

Our houses protect us from the elements, keeping us in an environment that’s usually more comfortable than that of the outdoors. I can deal with a house that’s too cold in the winter, or too hot in the summer. Water, on the other hand, I’m more touchy about. I expect a house to keep water in it’s place, and really get agitated when water appears in places it isn’t supposed to be.

Which is what happened Christmas eve day.

It started a month ago or so, with a leaky toilet. Not very leaky: there was just a steady drip, from one of the bolts that holds the tank to the bowl. When I discovered the leak I didn’t really want to figure out what the problem was, so I put a bucket under the toilet to catch the drips. The bucket couldn’t fit under the place where the drip was coming from, so I had to make a little plastic chute to direct the water into the bucket. This is the way I’d left it for several weeks.

We’ve had two earlier floods in the house. The first happened about four months after we’d moved in, while we were away. The water refill mechanism for the same toilet–in the master bathroom upstairs, failed catastrophically. The neighbor who was checking our mail described the result as a waterfall in our living room. Fortunately, I had recently painted the living room and all the furniture was moved out. And, because plumbing fixtures tend to be directly above one another, I think most of the water ended up in sinks in the basement.

After the living room ceiling was reconstructed after the first flood, I convinced myself that the bubbles I later saw develop in the ceiling were the result of slapdash workmanship, until one day my wife was taking a shower and a stream of water came from the ceiling. The plumber said that in all likelihood, the (lead) shower pan had disintegrated around the drain. Furthermore, the drain pipe was likely lead also, and would need to be replaced because putting a new drain on an old drain pipe was asking for more problems. To replace the drain pipe would require ripping up the floor of the bathroom and essentially, we might as well re-do the entire bathroom.

This sort of major work is easy to put off. The shower still leaks; we just don’t use it. We’ve been meaning to start a renovation for several months now, but there it sits. David Owen touches on this–the ability to live with substantial unfinished projects–in Sheetrock and Shellac, a fascinating book that anyone who has been involved in home repair and improvement ought to read.

This third flood, the one that happened Christmas Eve day, happened because the little plastic chute, to direct the drips into the bucket, became dislodged, and stayed that way for several days. The dripping water landed on the bathroom floor and sank down, accumulating in the living room ceiling. Sunday we noticed a small bubble in the ceiling. When I heard a stream of water falling from the ceiling Monday morning, the bubble was about a foot in diameter, a skin of paint mostly holding in several quarts of water but leaking at the edge.

After cleaning up the mess, it was time to fix the toilet. Toilet tanks, it turns out, have four holes in the bottom that must be sealed with gaskets: one for the water inlet, one for the discharge tube, and two for the bolts that connect the tank to the bowl. One of the gaskets on the bolts had mostly disintegrated, which produced the small leak.

The bolts actually serve two purposes: in addition to holding the tank and bowl together, they also clamp the gasket to ensure watertightness. Each bolt needs a pair of nuts: one clamps the gasket to the tank, and the other clamps the tank to the bowl. The holes on the bowl, through which the bolt passes, are large enough so that the first nut can rest inside.

In our toilet, there was only one set of nuts, clamping the gasket and attaching the tank. Between the tank and bowl was a u-shaped gasket that looked like it didn’t belong. I got the impression that years ago, some bargain handyman must have just used whatever he had with him to put the toilet back together.

Replacing the gaskets didn’t take long, and the leak stopped. Now, on to the ceiling!