There's a hole in the bucket

Oh! Wait! Not in the bucket, in my KITCHEN.

While we were up at Nana's, a mysterious water sound began in/around/under/somewhere in the vicinity of our kitchen. M spent the better part of a day crawling under the house trying the find the source, with no luck. So we called in the big guns, one of my favorite buddies, the plumber. M calls him MacGyver as he somehow manages to fix our verging on ridiculous plumbing issues. Remind me to tell you about the 26 inches of water in our basement the week after we moved in sometime ....

Anyway, MacGyver arrived, crawled around for a bit and resurfaced from under the house looking glum. "It's never good when I get a message from you," he said. He too could not find the source of the water, although he has a theory. Unfortunately, testing his theory will most likely result in the destruction of part of my kitchen. Because, you see, he can't actually get to the area where he thinks the burst pipe is without cutting through my circa 1771 floorboards. And even after cutting through where he thinks the problem is, there is no guarantee that he will find the problem as no one can actually see where the water is leaking out. We can just hear it gushing. So there may in fact end up being many, many holes in my floor.

I have a very special prize for whoever comes up with the most accurate estimate of how much this is going to end up costing us. To help you out, remember that my house was built in 1771, the bulk of it sits on dirt (think crawling on your belly through a two foot high crawl space littered with insulation and random piping and wiring), there have been two bathroom additions over the last 250+ years, and there is a poorly installed outdoor sprinkler system.

I'll take a hole in a bucket any day.