L'Eau de vie

Water. You really cannot do without it. Still, there is GOOD water. And there is BAD water. An obvious example of bad water being - rain. However annoying, rain is actually important for plants and flowers to grow. But there is another form of bad water that you CAN very well do without. This is the concept of "water all over the basement floor of your new house". Exactly.

Walking downstairs on Friday morning, I noticed this funny splashing sound as I came down the stairs. Hm. Not good. Then I saw the water come flushing out of two holes in the wall. Straight next to the fuse box! Not a very good combination. Shit. Shit. Shit.

So, we started testing where the water could come from. Running the tap did not result in much, but showering and the flushing of toilets, on any floor of the house, caused cascades of water to hit the basement floor.

Later, the painters arrived to look at the house, and they instantly became "plombiers" (with Euro-signs in their eyes, I'll tell you), and offered to break down the whole wall in the toilet room on the first floor to see where the water was coming from. As if we did not know. Duh. Flushing toilet = water in basement. Not a very difficult equation? (You need a hint?) Of course, the water came from the toilet.

The gardener arrived, and there was much cursing. But he could not figure it out either. After everybody left, we decided to go down to the basement to try wipe up the remaining water before we started searching for a hotel. As staying in a house with water is flushing into the electricity mains is not so high on my list.

That was then we realized that there was a separate fuse for something referred to as "poumpe". Hm. We could recall the previous owner briefly mentioning that the "poumpe" should always be off when people were not using the house. For some reason, it was now it was still in the "OFF" position. We put the fuses back in, and - just for the hell of it - went to flush a toilet. Guess what! NO WATER. Yay.

So, we had cracked the code that four locals had not been able to, with two of them being "plombiers" (yeah, right!), and one being the gardener who had worked with this house for 20 years. Promising.

As we now could turn the water supply back on, AND there was no need to find a hotel anyway, we completed filling the swimming pool with water. A task that had been going on for THREE DAYS. Yup. I do not really know how many liters of water has been involved, but it will surely show up on our next water bill.

Somehow I much prefer water in the pool to water in the basement, though. Any time. Pool water is typical good water. Well, at least as long as it stays in the pool. I hope I will not have to come back to you on that again at some later stage, but so far we have not seen any leaks in that department. Wheew.