All I Want for Christmas is a Dry House

Date and time: December 25, 2016. 2:45pm.

Scene: 

Presents have been opened, family is inside, turkey is out of the oven and the rest of the meal needs to be started. Husband is sitting outside talking to his Dad when he notices water dripping from the doors that lead to the porch. It hasn't rained recently. He pulls on the frame and more water pours out. 

Experience:

Dan comes inside and tells me something is leaking. He disappears upstairs and I wait. I work on getting dinner ready figuring it can't be that big of a deal (you know, because water is never a big deal in a house....) 

He comes back down at one point and grabs some buckets and tells me that the tub is leaking. I was a little confused at first. We had noticed the faucet dripping a few days ago but the dripping had stopped, my best guess was it stopped the night before because when I took my shower on Christmas Eve, I didn't see the faucet dripping. We believe it stopped dripping out of the faucet and started dripping underneath at that point. 

I head upstairs to help and we realize the buckets can't help because there isn't room under there for them. I try cups and bowls for a while but the water is dripping down the pipes so we really can't "catch" it. I grab a bunch of beach towels and rags and just stuff the interior of the tub cupboard with towels which seems to be the best move until we can shut off the water to the house. We turn on a fan and blow it under the cabinet to help dry things out. 

These pictures were taken before the leak under the tub.

Original pipes and connectors soldered together. 

Original faucet and hot/cold knobs. 

I head downstairs to help with dinner again and our 4 year old comes up to me and says, "Mommy, Grandpa found a wet spot on the ceiling." 

Nothing says Merry Christmas like a big wet spot in your sunroom ceiling. The good news is we had already planned on painting the ceiling so this will be hidden once we do that. 

Our tub is an early 90's design with the Pretty Woman style tub and a cabinet built around it to hide the plumbing. It's pretty ugly. There are two doors to get inside the cabinet and once you open it, you can see the tub and the plumbing. Turns out the faucet's pipes were soldered onto the pipes leading to the main water source. Once the main water was shut off, Dan went to Lowe's and bought the tools needed to cut the pipe and add shut-off valves. We still have to remove the old faucet but we haven't had time to go look for one and thankfully this isn't attached to the shower so the bathroom is still usable.

It's 3 days later now and we still have a fan blowing into the wet area. It's slowly drying out and with the minimal damage we believe occurred, we are comfortable just drying the area out and moving on to the next disaster.