Water Woes

So after an entire afternoon spent replacing faucets and scraping out old caulk and spreading new caulk and hunting down every possible leak, as soon as Younger Son turned on the water in the kids' shower, the ceiling began to rain again. I know this, because I was standing directly under that part of the ceiling with a towel, and when it began to drip, I jumped up on a conveniently-placed chair and put my finger over the drip. Actually, I put my finger right into the drip, since my finger did not stop when it reached the ceiling, but instead kept right on going and poked straight through the plaster. Sigh. At least I had moved the now-restored table out from under the leaky spot prior to allowing Younger Son to test the shower. Score one for me; evidently, I can be taught.

So it's official. The leak is not Something We Can Handle Ourselves. It is, in fact, Something We Need to Call Our Homeowners' Insurance About. And that makes me really, really twitchy. When it comes to home repair, there's not much we can't handle ourselves. On the rare occasion that we need to call in a professional, it has never yet required a call to homeowners' insurance. But the plumber, who came today, used words like "wall buckling" and "restoration expert" and "demolition" and "insurance claim" and "deductible" and all that has me just a little freaked out. I'm pretty attached to my house, and the knowledge that someone is going to be cutting holes in walls and messing with pipes is not making me happy. On the other hand, the fact that the plumber immediately mentioned "homeowners' insurance" makes me happy that we do have such insurance, even though I don't know how much the deductible is, because it sounds like whatever it is, the cost of the repairs is going to be more.

Of course, the fact that my house is going to get cut up, and likely stay that way for several weeks, and it's undoubtedly going to cost a lot of money, and be messy and inconvenient, is not the worst part. No, the worst part is that, until that shower is fixed, I will be sharing my shower with two adolescent males. Bleah.