photo courtesy Dennis Hurd on flickr

Do you remember the other day when I told you about painting our house? There was a bird’s nest in the way, and by God’s grace the baby bird took flight just before I had to remove the nest to paint. Well, during that same paint job I discovered evidence of another life form, one less welcome: termites. So after I was done painting I called a termite guy to check out the house. He looked around and said that I had done a good job painting, and patching holes that there wasn’t much left for him to do besides inspect for subterranean. He went under the house. When he came out he said, “no,” there was no evidence of subterranean, but there was something potentially just as bad, water. 

He pulled out his phone and showed me pictures of a little puddle of water under one of the bathrooms. He also took a picture of the beam and floor boards above the puddle. They were stained with water. He said it was strange because under the puddle was a vinyl plastic sheet for the water to rest on. Someone must have put that there a long time ago, he said. As he spoke the words my heart sank. Something was leaking  water under our house. This was very bad. 

Sheri and I wondered where the water was coming from. We thought that it must be the shower in the master bedroom. It was a walk in shower with tiles. We assumed that the grouting on the tile was wearing out and water was leaking through. So we scheduled a time to go down and figure out what was happening. I put on work clothes, and then a set of coveralls my father had given me, with a headlamp, and my cell phone. When I removed the cover and the wire mesh door to the crawl space, everything was crawling with spiders. My heart sank even further. One good sign was that a rat trap I had left just inside the crawl space was still loaded and had not been sprung. 

As I squeezed my body under the house everywhere was blanketed by spider webs. I began to pray to God to not let a black widow drop onto my exposed neck. I even tried to reason with the spiders out loud, “Listen spiders, you leave me alone, and I will leave you alone. Let’s just call a peace treaty for now, okay?” I belly crawled under the house to where the bathrooms were and found the puddle. It was hard to recognize because the light from the flashlights almost made it invisible. It also blended into the ground because spider webs blanketed the edges of it to the ground. Indeed the water sat on top of a plastic vinyl sheet. I shined my light into the water and small tiny swimming larvae were attracted to the light. I began to feel very uncomfortable. But I could not figure out how the water was there. It was not under a tub, shower, or sink. I heard Sheri walking on the floor above me. I called out to her, and she heard me. I asked her to flush the toilet. As soon as she did, water rained down from above in a circle dripping from the floorboards and supporting beams. The drops of toilet water fell like rain into the puddle. We had found the source of the leak. 

Back up top in the house I removed the toilet and discovered that the wax ring supposed to connect and seal the toilet to the drain pipe was not connected at all. There was no evidence that the wax ring ever properly sealed to the bottom of the toilet. It was as if for however many years it had been since this toilet was installed every time someone flushed the toilet some of the water fell in the sewer drain pipe, and the rest just spread out through the subfloor raining down under the house. 

Paul writes in