Fire and Water Update

It's been a busy month, I can't believe it was October 23rd since the last post! And it is about the fires and our lack of hot water. So, here is the update...

The fires slightly affected us. The day after I posted about it, it got really "cloudy." Being outside in the daytime was weird because everything was cast in an orange glow with the sun being partially blocked out by the clouds. Also, there were tiny, visible bits of ash floating around in the air. Will's poor stroller was outside on our porch and collected a thin layer of particulates. Cars also got kind of dirty, we actually still need to wash ours. It wasn't as bad as the amount of pollen that builds up in a day in the DC Spring, but I'm sure inhaling the particulates was a bit more unhealthy than inhaling pollen. We kept the house closed up as much as possible and ran the air conditioner in the car. Now all is well and we are back to our mild, normal sunlight colored California weather.

The office that I interviewed for a job at was not burned down in the fires. However, I did not get the job. Me and my silly demands to work part-time!

Now onto the soggy water issue. I finally went to the Y to take a shower on Wednesday. It was great! Although I did have to keep pushing the button to turn the water timer back on for the shower.

The home warranty people sent out a repair guy who wrote us a repair estimate for $650-$900 and told us that the warranty people would be contacting us. The warranty people did contact us and told us that the pipe was not covered because it was "outside" of the foundation of our house. You see, our water heater is in our garage. The pipe that was leaking was somewhere between our house and garage and therefore not covered. We were quite annoyed since we had waited for the warranty people to take care of it instead of us taking care of it ourselves. It's not like we didn't tell them where it was in the first place. So, rather than being stuck with a large bill, which included leak detection, Dan and Will went searching for the leak.

Will Learning about Home Ownership Issues

It wasn't very hard to find the leak. Since it was a hot water leak, the grass above the leak had died by this time. So Dan and Will dug a hole in the middle of the dead patch of grass. They found pipes, then had me turn on the water. It sprayed pretty strongly, freaking Will out a bit, so we quickly turned it off. Then, we called a plumbing company recommended by Carlie (she knows stuff), they came out, charged us a lot less to fix the pipe, and all was well.

We were kind of disappointed that we had to spend money to fix the leak, but a few days later, we received a check from the home warranty people that covered all but $25 of our expenses. I think that our realtor, April, had given them a call and 'convinced' them to reimburse us a 'good faith' amount to keep us as happy home warranty customers. If anyone needs a referral to a realtor in the South Bay Area, let us know. It's been a year since we bought the place and April is still very helpful.

So we got our water back. And Will eventually got used to his baths in the big bath tub. It seemed to help him out to either sit close to the front of the tub, or to sit wedged sideways in the tub so it felt a little smaller. Now when his brother is born, we can use the little tub for the little one and maybe Will can hang out in the bigger part of the tub.

That's our update!