So... after lunch yesterday we were sitting in the living room and heard a bit of a bang/bump. My spouse is a bit deaf, so he said; "What was that?" I thought it was water-hammer, as the dishwasher was on and we get a bit of water hammer sometimes. About 10 minutes later, I went down the hall for some reason, and could hear the washing machine filling with water. I was a bit surprised, as usually I organise the washing, especially after the 'good wool jumper thrown in with the work-gear' incident... I needn't have worried - the spouse had not decided to wash clothes, instead, it was the sound of water pouring out from under the hand basin in the bathroom.
Now, the bathroom is the only room in the house we have not renovated, because the previous owners had done it up and we just couldn't justify the expense of ripping out a relatively new bathroom and replacing it. Because of that, there was no tap under the basin to turn the water off, (we had installed taps under all other sinks/basins), so despite me being a gimp, I managed to run outside to the front of the house, locate the mains water and turn off the very stiff tap. It didn't turn off all the way... so it was still running out under the sink, so I ran out again and turned on the tap (on full) that is attached just in front of the mains, all the while yelling to my deaf husband for help.
About the same time, the dog must have decided she needed a pee, so she walked down the hall, saw all the water and must have decided she didn't want to walk in it (!!!!!), so she peed on the hall runner...
Meanwhile, the water had gone all over the bathroom floor, around into the separate toilet, all through the laundry and round into our newly carpeted bedroom. Luckily the hall runner stopped it running along the hall and into the other newly carpeted bedrooms.
(A short explanation of the bathroom sink set-up is needed here - it is one of those moulded all in one basin with bench-top extending either side.)
So, the spouse had removed all the stuff from under the bathroom sink to get to the burst pipe (which was a rubber/plastic pipe wrapped in stainless steel webbing. Despite that, it had a thumb-width hole blown in it!) OH yeah, and he put the stuff (you know - bottles of unused Christmas aftershave, cleaning supplies etc...) on top of the sink unit. Now, amongst the bottles was a spray can of adhesive, which was quite old and a bit rusty, and in all the jostling and bumping, and unnoticed by us, it had sprung a leak and was now oozing adhesive over the bench top amongst all the other bottles and stuff.
At the time, using brooms and mops and all the 'dog' towels, then most of the 'human' towels we managed to mop up most of the water, and I managed to sop up the big patch that had gone onto the new bedroom carpet. It was a fine sunny day, so we got all the mats and the hall runner out in the sun to dry. The spouse had even managed to find an old sink tap with bit of hose attached that was the right size, remove the bit of burst pipe and fix it into place.
Finally we got sopping towels into the washing machine and dried up any little missed bits with yet more 'human' towels and then the spouse said; 'What's that smell?"
It took us a few moments to work out where the smell was coming from, but finally I located the can which was still oozing. I couldn't take it outside, because it would have dripped all over tiled and timber floors on the way out, so we needed a plastic bag to put the can in. Now, in 2019, some bloke decided it was his mission to rid Australia of all plastic bags, and through a series of bullying and idiocy he managed to do it. We used to recycle our plastic bags, so could guarantee none ever went into the ocean... We now have 'forever' shopping bags, which you purchase at the supermarket, which are porous. Never-the-less, that is what we were forced to grab and stuff the can into. Through this operation the adhesive stuck to our hands, and the bag and stuck the bag to us, but at least it wasn't dripping onto anything for a few moments so the spouse could get the bag outside before it stared to drip through the bag. In that time, I managed to find a big black plastic garbage bag, get the bleedin' thing open and with much to-ing and fro-ing managed to get wrestle the can into the bag and unstick ourselves from the bag.
Both of our hands were now covered in adhesive. We couldn't look at the can to see what cleaned it up as it was now safely and permanently inside the black plastic bag and the porous shopping bag...
I managed to get a bottle of nail polish remover open, but that just smeared the adhesive without removing it, making it slightly worse. Working our way through various toxic chemicals, we finally found some gum turpentine which removed the *&^%! stuff. The spouse ripped up bit of old sheet, while I doused the bits in turpentine and wiped it off both our hands and the turps container lid. All the used rag went into a box he had found (no bags, remember) and then with more ripped sheet and turps I managed to clean it off the myriad of bottles and cleaning supplies and bath stuff that were on the sink and then cleaned the benchtop part and the trail that had gone down into the basin (but thankfully not down the plughole), then any door handles we had touched, the lids of the other toxic chemicals etc etc...
After that, I drank wine.
On the bright side - there is no water-mark on the new carpet and the tiled floors down that end of the house are spotless!
Sounds like fine comedy to me. The only thing missing was a loose mains wire in the electrical socket next to the sink (that's what we call it up here). Then the fumes from the glue would have generated another level of catastrophe.
I'm a bit intrigued by the stainless steel reinforced water hose. Generally those things can withstand enormous pressures. I was at the hardware store today, precisely looking at stainless steel wrapped extensions for lavatories, toilet, appliances. A typical rating for one of those is well over 1000 psi! That's a tremendous level of pressure you never see in a household application (water). Something strange must have happened.
For comparison, a soft transparent vinyl water hose has a rating of 50 psi. If the vinyl hose has glass fibre reinforcing mesh (the white and transparent kind) the rating goes up to 200 psi. A hard chlorinated PVC (CPVC) pipe (replacement for copper water pipe) has a rating of 400 psi for cold water, and 100 psi for boiling hot water.
Something unnatural is lurking in your water pipes
