If good luck is all you have, take it

“Well, that was a lucky water break.” Trust me, if you have to say you had a water break, it’s best to have a lucky one.

Way back in the early days of Pam and John, we had a water break under the trailer house we were living in. It flooded the pit that the water cistern was in under the house. The temperature was 50 degrees below zero. The water break was inside the pit of water. That was not a lucky water break.

Last winter we had a water main break somewhere in the 400 feet of water line between our water source and our house. We spent four months without running water in our old house because the new one wasn’t ready to be moved in to, even for roughin’-it type living. That was not a lucky water break.

Any regular readers keeping track of our build-it-yourself house project and the slow dying of our current aged, disabled and dilapidated home know that we have been without a clothes washer for some time now. Long enough to have warranted purchasing a machine, tearing apart a support wall to get access to the room to swap the new machine for the old one and repairing the wall – in a house that will be dozed when I move out.

Not buying a wash machine is just another in a long list of life decisions that would have been made entirely differently if hindsight could be tapped at the moment of decision-making – that moment when planning and forethought say, “Meh, I don’t know. Let’s try this.” And they have totally miscalculated the future.

We have been without a washing machine using the laundromat long enough to have paid for a top of the line, matching washer and dryer set with a bit of change leftover. Whatever.

Those laundromat days are over now, though. I have a washing machine now. It works beautifully. Thank you for asking.

We set up in the space that will one day be the downstairs shower because the utility room isn’t sheet rocked yet, the shower has a functioning floor drain, and we had enough garden hoses to stretch from the water source to the washing machine location. It seemed like the right solution. I still stick by that. However.

My husband got the machine hooked up and ran it through a wash cycle, sort of like a check ride. He declared it awesome and good to go, and while we took the time to high-five each other before moving on to the next project, the Universe was plotting a scheme. If only we would cooperate.

“Wait for it,” the Universe said. “Wait for it. Wait for it … .” Then we went to bed with visions of laundry-at-home chores dancing in our heads. “Yes!”

We didn’t turn off the water lines, the garden hoses not made for pressurized hot water usage. We knew better, but fortunately, luck had our backs.

Luckily, John couldn’t sleep and got up at 4-something a.m. and up to the project house by 4:30 a.m. to discover that at some point the hot water hose had burst open, allowing the on-demand water heater to pump a spray of consistently hot water across the entire width of the house.

Luckily – of all the directions the water could have gone, soaking tools, materials, insulation or sheet rocked walls – the initial burst of water shot 25 feet and splattered into an exterior door. It did not hit the double-sheet rocked wall on either side of the door, the insulated walls to the right and behind, or the tools, workbench and papers to the left. And the flooding across the floor, pooled in the center of the area and pretty much exited our domicile freely, over the exterior door jambs.

And luckily, the wet stuff was salvageable – and floors needed cleaning anyway.

Granted, it would have been better to be able to say, “Well, that water line installation went in without a hitch,” but life isn’t always like that, now, is it. Sometimes, though, luck will keep you going.

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And the Universe laughed and laughed at [email protected].