Here followeth the long awaited post from the designated Iowegian:
billt, I feel your pain!! Thanksgiving weekend the wife noticed a wet spot on the carpet in the dining room. When the plumber arrived he made the assumption that it was a leak in the basebaord radiator on the other side of the wall, in the kitchen. He returned on Monday, opened up a section of the dining room wall behind said radiator and found no leak. While he was there, the wife was doing a load of laundry. While he was sitting there contemplating where the leak might be, the washer went into the spin cycle, creating a fountain in our dining room. Long story short, we had a broken (rotted out) galvanized exit pipe under the kitchen. We were unable to avoid the jackhammering of the kitchen floor, however. If you ever have the opportunity to have somebody jackhammer up your floor, pass. While they had the floor open, they replumbed the entire house with flexible plastic piping. Then we replaced the carpet in the dining room, living room, and adjoining hallway (all the same pattern), as well as the vinyl in the kitchen. $12,000 later, and the house was back to normal......sort of. As the flooring guy was installing the last trim plate between the new vinyl in the kitchen and the old vinyl in the entryway, he managed to screw through one of pipes that feeds the kitchen radiator, which created another fountain. He shut off the main water supply, and (sheepishly) came to the store to tell me about it. I called the plumber, who peeled back some of the NEW vinyl in the kitchen, and some of the old vinyl in the entryway, brought in the contractor with the jackhammer, and dug up another section of floor. The pipe was fixed and the new concrete poured on that little debacle the same afternoon. Now we're just waiting for the new entryway vinyl to arrive so it can be installed.
I'd ask "what next?", but I REALLY don't want to know.