Togetherness

Thursday and Friday last week, the four cats spent the day together in the master bedroom upstairs. They came out of it getting along a little better. On Friday, it was clear they had a play date in the closet. Laundry was pulled out of the closet and things were knocked off my crowded dresser. The stick was out of the track and the door ajar just a few inches, enough for a cat to get in.

The reason for the days of togetherness was contractors coming in and out of the house. It's better if the cats just hunker down in the upstairs bedroom. The contractors were a plumber, a leak detector, and a restoration expert with moisture detecting equipment. We have a massive failure of the water pipes that were laid into the foundation when the house was built. The pipe bringing water to the kitchen sink failed in Bob's office, the room where pipes in the walls and ceiling have failed before. This time it's under the floor. Monday afternoon I noticed a strange noise around the water heater. Tuesday afternoon it was louder and seemed to be coming up through the kitchen sink as well. Wednesday morning on the way to work I called the plumber. In the afternoon when I got home I called him again. He couldn't get to the house but he led me through a series of experiments and investigations and concluded that we have a foundation leak.

I turned off the water supply at the street and shut off the circuit breaker to the water heater. Thursday the plumber came by to take a look and the leak detector listened with special equipment until he found the leak. Friday the restoration expert confirmed that the leak didn't appear to have sent water up into the house but down into the ground. That guess seems confirmed by the saturated ground on the north side of the house.

We have been turning the water and the heater on only long enough to take showers and fill up buckets and pitchers. Yesterday I filled up both sides of the sink and washed the week's accumulated dishes and we started using paper plates. We are camping in the house.

The cats are coping pretty well with the paper plates, but it was comical the first time. Because the paper plates are lightweight, they scoot across the floor faster than the stoneware plates the cats are used to dining on. At dinner time Nick and Bonnie's plates went around each other like bumper cars, with the cats licking furiously at their food all the time. Daisy's plate went over the top of the carpeted cat barrel she eats on, like a tub over the edge of Niagara Falls. This morning Bob put their breakfast plates against the baseboard so they wouldn't have so much chasing to do.

The cats are probably facing at least one more week of togetherness in the upstairs bedroom, maybe more. Tomorrow, the plumber will give us an estimate on repiping through the walls, which all of the professionals agree is the best option. The pipes have reached the end of their lifespan, twenty-eight years. It would be nice if they could have made it another year or two, but they plumb gave out. We could tear up the floor and repair the broken pipe only to have it break again in another place five minutes later and tear the floor up again. The short term fix makes no sense from any angle.