Right. So What Was I Doing?!

On, technically, Wednesday (14/12) I discovered that a frozen pipe had burst in my grandmother's former home.  

The resultant water leak was limited to one of the living rooms and the adjacent kitchen. Leaving around 10mm of standing water.

Obviously that's not a huge amount of water. However it's around 11mm more standing water than you want.

So the first thing I had to do was hire a wet/dry vacuum cleaner to act as a vacuum pump. Along with the electrical transformer to power it. That didn't arrive until the Friday (16/12).

Then the carpet in the carpeted living room had to come up. While the all the ceiling tiles in both rooms had to come down.

In terms of damage. It was nowhere near as bad as I was expecting.

The first thing I did was turn the electrical supply off. Even before turning the water supply off. Drowning wasn't my immediate concern.

Even so the lighting ring. The circuit running between the sodden floor and the sodden ceiling. That's ruined. The lightbulbs were full of water. I don't been a little bit of damp. I mean they'd make a nice home for a small goldfish.

I've not checked the outlet ring in any of the rooms. However the much better waterproofed kitchen ring did, just about, cling on. I've used a lot of fuse wire.

Longterm I think it will all need to be replaced. However, in terms of difficulty, wiring three core cable into plug sockets is remarkably similar to wiring three core cable into plugs.

With the exception of a very large crack in one of the rooms. The ceiling finishing plaster seems to be fine. Which strongly suggests that the ceiling boards are also fine.

That makes it extremely unlikely that there is any structural damage. Load-bearing things tend to be a lot stronger than non-load-bearing things.

The damage is actually so minor. That I don't currently know which pipe burst. To find out I'll need to pull up ceiling/floor boards.

Now the immediate crisis has been mitigated. It's really now just a matter of letting it all really dry out.

Something I'm pencilling in for around May 2023.