Subtitle: Waterless in Kansas City — Day 2
Thursday was day two of our water shortage. It started with my checking with our home owner’s insurance to see if it might cover any of the expense. The answer was no. It only covers anything within the frame of the house. Anything sticking out, like pipes and drains, are not covered.
That led me to doing phone calls to three other plumbing companies to get bids from other companies. One came out in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one isn’t available to come until Saturday afternoon. The company that checked it out on Wednesday afternoon sent its bid by e-mail Thursday afternoon. The company that came Thursday morning, we haven’t seen their bid, though they were supposed to have the bid ready by Thursday afternoon.
Having the two bids was helpful, though it pinned Betsy down at home, instead of doing her usual work. As usual, it was apples to oranges, so I spent a lot of time on the phone scheduling people to come, and then talking to them afterwards to understand how the two bids actually compared.
Pricewise, the first bid was a thousand dollars less than the second one, but it also had the best timeframe to completion, best warranty, and fullest package. So after getting and viewing both bids, we accepted the first one. We should be getting a call today to arrange to have the work done on Monday. That is the fastest we can get — three more days, and five total days without running water in the house.
There was a certain irony Wednesday night that we had no running water, but a very heavy rain and thunderstorm. We compounded that water irony on Thursday by using our season tickets at Oceans of Fun to go swimming for two hours — and then using the showers there at the park to wash our hair and get the showers we couldn’t get at home due to the lack of running water. In the old days people in our situation might choose to stay at “the club.” As I told Betsy, the park, and our season tickets, is one of our “clubs”. Another alternative would have been to use our membership at the community center — except we are taking a break from the center over the summer. But either way, we actually have a lot of options when we don’t have running water in the house.
But even without running water, we did a lot of cleaning. The daughter had let about three-days’ dishes pile up in the kitchen before the water went. I got the entire family together: me washing, Betsy rinsing, and both kids drying, assembly-line style, and we caught it all up using less than 2 gallons of jug water and a dishpan. So we had water in a lot of places — just none of it in the pipes.
At The Rainbow 