We closed on our house yesterday--the Friday before Memorial Weekend. We were pushing hard to get closed so we could have the weekend to start work on the house. Jackie White, from Accurate Title, worked hard to make this happen. Also, the hand of God was present to line up the timing of events and contacts we had to make. Jackie said there were 4 title companies involved on the seller's side--and one of them appears to be run from a call center in India.

Our first order of business is to get the mold out of the house. We got a dumpster ordered & went Friday night to turn on the water and get started. I knew there was one place I had to fix because the water line that supplies the ice maker was crimped with a pair of vice-grip pliers. I cut and capped that line. But when I turned the main valve a thin spray of water came from the water meter. The bank must have been slow in getting the house winterized and so water froze and broke the meter.

We decided we could live with the small leak for the time we checked out the rest of the house. We turned on the second valve and heard the ringing tone of water flowing through the pipes. We worked quickly through the house checking for flow in each of the sinks. Those on the main level and in the basement were doing fine so I increased the flow and we kept watching to see how they would handle the full flow. But when I checked the upstairs bath, we had nothing getting there. A few minutes later we discovered why--all of the water was going into the master bedroom and bath ceiling. Short video HERE.

We had planned to tear out ceilings in both rooms as well as all the walls of the master bath, but we didn't plan on this work being the first thing we did. But we're learning to roll with whatever comes along. I'm going to install shut-off valves so we can get water to some of the house. Brenda will proceed with her plan of scraping the popcorn texture off the ceilings in the upstairs bedrooms to get them ready for us to live in while we work on the rest of the house. Then I'll start tearing holes in the ceilings to find the broken pipes.

We didn't get the hydrogen peroxide ordered in time for this weekend, but Brenda read online that Borax will kill mold. We're going to do a surface treatment with a Borax solution for now & will use the peroxide when we start tearing into the places we know are saturated with mold.