But to know how we got here, we have to know where we've been. So Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to the 1960s. Back in those days, what is now the city/county of Virginia Beach was largely comprised of a naval base, a semi-isolated beach resort town, various unincorporated hamlets, acres of farm land, and whole lots of swamp land. Well, these folks were growing ever more afraid that they might go to bed one night and wake up to find they'd become part of the ever-growing city of Norfolk, so they came together to incorporate into their own city. This being the Cold War and all, what happened next was pretty predictable: The ever-growing size of the naval base meant a population explosion, one that led to the city eventually becoming the most populous in the state. But it also meant that a lot of that swamp land got "reclaimed" for the various housing projects over the next 4 decades.

This leads to the construction of my house in the 1980s, atop what we later discovered was some of that reclaimed swamp land. And it might as well have been built atop a cemetery, because this place is cursed. Apparently it was built as one of a pair of houses back in the 80's by two brothers, one of whom remains in the twin house as our neighbor to this day. But the budget must have been "HA!" because this place has so many signs of cost-cutting that it's ridiculous. The HVAC unit installed was undersized for this house so it gave us yearly issues until it finally just crapped out 2 years ago, the kitchen seems to have 3 circuits (1 oven, 1 lighting, 1 for wall outlets) of which the last can't seem to run more than two appliances simultaneously without the breaker tripping, several of the outlets in the house have just decided to stop working altogether, and we've had near constant issues with the plumbing in the master bathroom upstairs because it was added as part of a project by the previous owner to convert a single huge upstairs bedroom into two individual rooms (bedroom & study) with the bathroom as part of the dividing wall.

Which brings us two weeks ago, when I first noticed that there was a discolored patch of ceiling in the downstairs hallway. I didn't think it too concerning at first, until Thursday afternoon when there was suddenly a wet patch in the middle of the discoloration, a growing damp spot on the carpet directly below, and a noticeable sag in the drywall. A quick investigation turned up the culprit: A leak had developed in the master bathroom sink upstairs at least a day earlier and my mother (in her infinite wisdom) had just thrown a bucket underneath the spot she thought it was coming from and told no one. As afternoon turned to evening, the drops of water from the ceiling seemed to cease and appeared to have dried up by the following morning. Or so we thought, until midday when what had been a slow drip turned into a steady drip and then into a stream of water. By the time it was all said and done, I'd had to remove a chunk of mushy drywall roughly the size of a 2x4 and about 2lbs of sopping wet fiberglass insulation just to try to limit any further damage.

When we finally got a plumber out here on Wednesday, we learned that the actual source of the leak was two-fold: The faucet that my father replaced over 5 years ago had started leaking and the cold water line had a small leak, both of which contributed to the water flow every time the sink was filled. And then we got another surprise when we asked for an estimate to check out what would needed to be done to address a persistent leak from the toilet in same bathroom: The geniuses who installed the flooring had used wood 1/2 the normal thickness, which had become spongy due to the constant humidity and begun to sag. This went a long way to explaining why we'd had to replace the wax ring twice in the nearly 2 decades we've lived here, as the throne eventually works itself free due to not being entirely stable. Between the work on Wednesday and the estimate to replace the entire flooring in that bathroom, we're looking at over $2,000 in bills (assuming we don't find any further horrors under the flooring). And then there's the question of whether to hire a general contractor to repair the ceiling or do it ourselves...ugh. They moved the headstones, but they left the bodies!

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CdrMike, Overwatch Reject