There is a reason why I am not an optimistic person. Usually, as soon as I start looking on the positive side of life, fate steps in to bring me back to the darker side.  Following my last peppy post, this is exactly what happened. I should have known better than to bask in the glory of the projects we have completed around the house since moving in 6 months ago.  There I was, gleefully claiming that we haven’t had many projects to blog about just recently.  Well, not any more.

Friday afternoon, I noticed that there was a puddle of water on our breakfast table.  I was puzzled by this, but not especially alarmed.  When Rick got home later that evening, I showed him said puddle, which had grown considerably in size. We deduced that the water was dripping down from the kitchen light fixture. We ran upstairs  to the spare bedroom above the kitchen and found this:

 

A section of the flooring was absolutely soaked through  – this was what was seeping into the kitchen downstairs.  The bedding and mattress were also soaked.  There was significant water damage on the bedroom ceiling, where water had busted through from the attic above:

There was so much water coming through that Rick had to empty the light fixture of the water (we made sure the electric was off!)

In the attic, we found the offender.  The tray under the air handler (for the air conditioning units) was leaking water. It had overflowed so much so that the water seeped through the attic flooring, through the bedroom ceiling, onto the bedroom floor and into the kitchen, two floors down.

As soon as we made this discovery, we called the peeps who have our home warranty and an hour later, a technician came round to look at the problem.  The guy found two issues: apparently, the tray should extend the whole way underneath the airhandler.  Secondly, the tray appears to be cracked, so it wasn’t holding in any of the water at all.  There was not much else that could be done so late on Friday night, except for turning the upstairs air conditioning unit off.  The guy will be ordering a new tray Monday, so hopefully it will be fixed sometime this week.  In the meantime, we need to start thinking about replacing the ceiling sheetrock in the kitchen and spare bedroom, plus the flooring in the attic and bedroom.  We’ll also have to replace that mattress – all that water means that it just isn’t salvageable.  We’re hoping the bedding will come out okay, although I’m not too optimistic.  Back to my usual self then

Tags: air conditioner, attic, ceiling, flooring