My Saturday Night

It was a normal Saturday afternoon. The kids were asleep. I talked Tony into straightening the garage while I went to the grocery store to grab a few things. Little did I know our evening would turn into anything but ordinary.

Tony greeted me as I was getting out of the car after running to the grocery store as any good husband would by saying, "So, I was putting nails in the wall to hang tools up and I hit a natural gas line." I mean, that's totally normal, right?? WRONG! I parked on the street and I could totally smell and hear the natural gas leaking out of the pipe in our garage. Tony proceeded to tell me everything was okay and the gas people were on their way. He said the lady he talked to told us we didn't need to evacuate. However, both of us found that a little bit strange, considering the recent house explosion in Saratoga Springs involving natural gas. We couldn't smell anything in our house and we both felt okay about staying inside. About 30 minutes later the gas man arrived and one of the first things he said was the lady should have told us to evacuate. Oh great, I thought. But, since the leak was in the garage and Tony opened the garage door there was only a very small trace of gas in Annika's room because her room is above the garage, so everything was okay. After the gas man turned off the gas he had Tony cut into the wall to expose all the pipes. (See image to the left.) As soon as he saw the pipes he started going on and on about how the they were installed totally wrong. The pipes in our wall are secured. If they are secured there is supposed to be a nail plate to protect them. Generally the pipes are supposed to be free in the wall, so that if a nail does hit them the nail can "bounce" off the pipe and the pipe can move over, thus NOT puncturing the pipe. As you can see in the image above, Tony first nicked the pipe (bottom mark), then he punctured a hole in it (top mark). Okay, so it really wasn't ALL Tony's fault--I guess he just got unlucky.

So, now we have a punctured gas line, that come to find out, was not ours, it's our neighbor's line...and they aren't home. The whole turning the gas off was only the beginning. We need to get the pipe repaired. So it's now about 8:00 on a Saturday night and not a lot of people work with this kind of pipe. The gas man was awesome and tried to help us find someone reasonable to come and fix it. Tony called 19 people and only talked to a few of them. One guy quoted us 4 times what it would cost on a week day to fix. So now here's our dilemma--our neighbors still aren't home. Are they out of town...or will they be home tonight... Do we fix it now, or later... As we were contemplating, a repairman called us back and said he didn't have the exact piece to fix it, but he could do a few other things to make it work. Tony would have to cut out more drywall though. (See image bottom right.) It sounded like he knew what he was talking about and he wasn't going to take us to the bank over it. So rather than chancing our neighbors coming home to a house with no heat or hot water and hating us, we had him come out. Right as he was getting here the repairman that the gas man referred to us called and we ran the plan by him and he said it would work, so I felt good about the repair. By now we figured we shouldn't have to pay for this. It's against code so the contractor, installer, or inspector should have to pay. The repairman confirms our sentiment. He could not believe 1) it was installed this way; and 2) there haven't been more instances on our street like this. Chances are all the other homes have the same installation mishap in their garages. The repairman even left us the book that the manufacturer makes that says NOT to do exactly what was done in our garage. By the time the repairman left it was 11:00 and I was just putting a batch of cookies into the oven which is a great way to end any normal Saturday night. By now Tony and I are having a good laugh about the whole thing. I mean, who wouldn't want 3 gaping holes in their garage with a story to tell?