our water is hot

So the girls are off on their summer adventure with Granny. Mike and I are were positively giddy with anticipation.... what would we do with our five kid free days? Go out of dinner? Catch a movie? Meet up with friends? Hit some garage sales? The options were endless. We started with dinner out Thursday night, it was delicious, we go to talk without a gazillion interruptions and we completed intentional act of kindness number four. In a word it was great until we got home only to find our hot water tank had rotted out and was emptying it's water all over our basement floor.

The contents of our basement were unscathed because when you live in the sticks you have a little something called a sump pump, basically a giant hole in the floor collects and pumps ground water out of your basement. Luckily our hot water tank is very close to our sump pump hole and the floor is slanted in that direction. That's the good news. The bad news our new sump pump is so quiet neither Mike or I could hear it running way more that it should have been. Which would have been a tip off that something was wrong. Also when you live in the sticks you don't have access to city water. We have water trucked in and dumped into our holding tank. More bad news, we lost half a tank of water out the sump pump hole. For those of you keeping track at home, we had not a drop of water in the house. No showers, no washing your hands, no flushing the toilet.

More good news, we rent our water tank so a quick call into our rental company had us an appointment for a hot water tank replacement the following afternoon. More bad news, when the repair guy finally showed up (90 minutes past our 1pm - 5pm window) he couldn't complete the call because we had zero water in the house. More bad news our regular water guy was away for the weekend with his wife. We called our second favourite water guy, but he couldn't be there until the following morning. We had to reschedule the repair.

Then all hell broke loose when several bands of extreme wind and rain whipped through the village. The neighbourhood is littered with branches. We have five trees down at our church alone. Multiple branches down in our yard. The power was off for hours and with no power we had no working sump pump so our basement did indeed flood. Thank goodness for Poppa and the generator and his willingness to come over here to get the water pumped out. Good news, that crazy rain allowed us to collect back the half tank of water we lost on the basement floor, so now we were ready for the repairman. I am happy to report that he did in fact finally arrive to replace the hot water tank, but first he had to replace our venting that was no longer up to code. The shower that I eventually got to have will go down in history as one of the best showers I have ever had in my life. I will point out that we were more than welcome to shower at Poppa's, but we figured we'd be all fixed up by Friday afternoon and then the storm hit and here we are.

So all our giddy what should we do with all this free time equated to us being chained to the house with some combination of the following.... no hydro, no water, no hot water. The good news..... the trees that came down didn't damage our house, we finally did get the tank replaced and our hydro came back on a lot sooner than some people out there, so really there isn't too much to complain about.