Well, I guess you should always expect that something needs to go wrong during the blissful first months of new home ownership to bring you back down to cold hard reality…and MPLMP was not gonna let me miss out on that experience. Amid the craze of summer activities, the tank mounts on the second floor bathroom toilet had begun to give way. Drip by drip water made its way down the outside of the toilet bowl and beneath the toilet where there was a concealed hole in the ceramic tile floor. The water passed through the hole to the plaster ceiling of the kitchen below building up to a point of saturation when it began to drip to the kitchen floor, and that’s when I got the phone call from Josh letting me know there was a large puddle of water on my kitchen floor and drips coming from the ceiling. He quickly shut off the water to the toilet, but I was to find out that would not stop the flow. Josh had put a towel down to mop up the mess, but the ceiling was still dripping from one of the many cracks. So I ran over to the house drained and disassembled the toilet and sink (did I mention the faucet constantly drips and the trap was leaking on that too?) and assessed the situation. The previous toilet installer decided to cut some corners and used steel bolts to attach the tank to the base of the toilet. These bolts had rusted significantly and were letting water out of the tank at a constant slow flow. Then, the ceramic tile floor, as it turned out, had a hole around the sanitary mount where water could descend directly to my kitchen ceiling. I dried everything out as best I could and left it to air out until the next day. My dad and I then did our best impression of Burt and Al Large and started to put everything back together again (if you’ve never watched Doc Martin, then what are you waiting for?). We cleaned out the hole in the floor around the toilet mount and filled with cement (day 1), then cleaned and reset the loose floor tiles. The toilet got cleaned and all new innards and mounts installed (day 4). The sink piping was replaced with heavy duty nickel-plated copper with a trap cleanout (no cutting corners here folks). And after 3-4 days Josh (being the only full-time resident of MPLMP currently) didn’t have to use the toilet in the basement anymore! Now I just need to find some affordable, functioning, and historically appropriate faucet hardware to replace the leaky junk on there now. Looking for a silver lining? Well there is one…sorf of. I had initially convinced myself that I was going to have to remove the waterdamaged plaster completely…but as it turns out the old metal lath plaster is a superior system to wood lath and unless it was raining in my house for an extended period of time I have no need to remove it. I also now have an excuse to get rid of the ugly textured pop corn ceiling in the Kitchen earlier than I had planned! I started scraping right away, and most of it came showering down to reveal beautiful smooth plaster…with a handful of cracks of course…some missing finish plaster. Can you believe my beautiful little kitchen was once painted this color from head to toe (and I thought the pepto colored bedroom was bad)?   The full repair of the kitchen ceiling has been put on hold as Kit and I, with help from my dad have begun painting the rooms on the first floor. However, soon after the puddle in the kitchen incident, I discovered that my gutters were clogged with debris. How did I discover this you might ask…well, by yet another puddle appearing now in the basement supplied by water coming in through the window well. Nothing like a built-in water feature to give a sense of tranquility! Luckily a faucet mounted siphon drained the water from the basement floor (as I apparently have no floor drain or perimeter trench drain) and an hour of dancing with power lines on an extension ladder later the gutter was clean and able to carry water. Now if only I could restore my underground stormwater collection system (all of them are capped right now). All in all my adventures with water helped remind me that I can never expect everything that might be thrown my way with MPLMP, however it generally turns out alright in the end. Now to get back to the fun stuff like painting, and landscaping!