Landing in hot water

After finishing my third lengthy conference call of the day on Wednesday, I received a call form my wife with some bad news. She called in a panic to inform me that our Water heater had burst. It was the very same water heat I looked at last week and said “Boy I should really replace this thing”. I grabbed my things and darted out of the office.

On the drive home, I started to wonder about the damage the burst likely caused. We had just finished our basement including pergo flooring. My office is also down stairs so I wondered what was ruined. My dad called form the house and told me to meet him at Lowes as we’d need to get a new water heater asap.

After screwing around at Lowes for almost an hour, we finally got the needed equipment. They wanted to charge almost $400 for an “Emergency install”. Now mind you, had I not said “Emergency” they still would have come next day, it just would have cost $200 less. Not being a fan of extra fees or employees who don’t know what they’re doing, we decided to have the family handyman install it instead.

The new water heater is now in, although I’m still assessing the damage. The wood floor is done for I’m afraid but it looks like my carpet may be saved after all. Nothing else was damaged (yet) so I’m actually very lucky my wife caught it when she did.

Although it’s tough to find a silver lining here, I did come across one. As a new parent, or any parent for that matter, whenever you get a panic riddled call from your spouse, your first thought is that something has happened to your child. Having it instead be a flooded basement actually was a relief. That reminds me, I’m going to tell me wife to now start each phone call with “Eric is fine”.

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