Tear Outs and Plumbing and New Tricks, Oh My!

It's been quite the week for us here in Champaign. We've been working for the past couple weeks on tearing out the two rooms upstairs, and we're making good progress on that front. We aren't back in an actual bed upstairs yet, but we're close. The plan was to be back in there by Sunday or Monday night, but as usual, life intervened.

When my parents were here a few weeks ago, we discovered a leak in the ceiling of the pantry. Luckily, our homeowner's warranty that the sellers bought for us when we got the house covers plumbing leaks, so we had a plumber out to look at it. It turned out that there was a leak in the drain pipe coming out of the bathroom, and whenever we used the sink or toilet it let water into the ceiling. He told us that he could fix the problem, but it would take all day, so he arranged to come by last Wednesday to get it taken care of. Well, it turned out to be a bigger project than he had anticipated because when the house was built, all of the plumbing was put in the subfloor, so it's kind of hard to get to without ripping out the whole floor. He was able to fix the problem by diverting the drain into an unused drain pipe in the kitchen. So it was a messy, hard work day, but we thought it was taken care of.

Before:


During:


After:


So that worked for a couple of days, until we gave Abby a bath on Sunday night. Monday morning we woke up to a basement full of water. Okay, maybe "full" is a bit of an overstatement, but we clearly had a pretty big leak that left water in huge puddles all over the laundry room and bathroom down there. The logical assumption was that it had something to do with the plumbing we had just fixed, so Adam spent Monday and Tuesday nights trying to find where the leak was coming from. He had the plumber come back today, and they eventually found the problem.

The Problem:


The kitchen sink was originally along the same wall as the pantry, and it had used the drain pipe that we diverted the bathroom drainage into. But when whoever moved the sink moved it, they didn't cap off the sink drain, so when we pushed a large amount of water at once, like from draining a bath, it came shooting straight out of that pipe and into the wall. So Adam's at Home Depot right now getting a cap to cover that, and then hopefully our plumbing problems will be over. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

On the Abby front, she's picked up lots of new tricks lately. We didn't get any pictures of this, but one of her new favorite things is to blow her nose. She'll hold a tissue or napkin up to her face and blow out her nose, then run over to her stuffed animals, or Lucy, or Adam or me, and hold it up to our face and blow out her nose. Jenn, you'd better learn how to blow your nose pretty soon. Your one year old niece is one up on you.

Abby's also decided that either walking or crawling backwards is just hilarious, so she'll get into a mood and just walk backwards all around the house. I think it must be in her genes - she's a little tour guide in training! She does pretty well with it. She's not as fast as when she walks forward, but she hardly ever runs into anything or falls down.





She's also a big fan of giving her stuffed animals rides on any of our furniture that moves. So she'll push them back and forth on the ottoman, or spin them around on the patio chairs. The other day I was sitting in the chair, and she decided to give me a ride, too.



She's a big fan of that porch. She likes to play peek-a-boo around the door when you're out on the porch and she's inside.



She also likes to play under the table that we have out there. It's a good size for a little one to get underneath and poke all the little parts that stick out!