Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Challenge Prep Setback

Normally, the handful of days leading up to the Challenge kick-off are filled with frantic miniature prepping - filing mold lines, attaching to bases and priming.  This year's a bit different.  Don't get me wrong - there's a great deal of frantic activity but it's more focused on repairing the broken water line in my hobby area rather than the more important hobby related items.

The culprit - the leak happened at the upper junction 
A copper joint failed and my hobby area was subjected to a bit of water damage.  Luckily it was more of a pinprick leak / spray rather than full on broken pipe and the resulting gushing torrent.  Thankfully no miniatures were lost in the flood but a lot of my sectional terrain pieces got ruined and a good deal of terrain supplies (matte board, foam core etc) was damaged  Note to self - water soluble glue is really easy to work with but does have a bit of a flaw when a pipe leaks.....

I think the wet ground foam has dealt a mortal wound to my trusty shop-vac.

The carpet in the basement got wet and will need to be dried and then cleaned.  All of this means I'll be off to a bit of a slow start to this year's challenge.  I'm off to rent a carpet cleaner tomorrow.  Exciting times!

You can see the water creeping along the carpet.  Since the carpet is over 15 years old, I suspect my wife may attempt to justify a "its time for new carpet" argument. She's likely right but I fight a delaying action to get through the Challenge.  Some things  need to have priority in life.

In some ways we were very lucky - the spot where the leak occurred was the area where we used to hide our sons Christmas presents in the days that Santa Claus "existed".  Now that would have been a disaster

7 comments:

Peter Douglas said...

Bad luck Miles, but could have been much worst. FYI Air Canada lost a piece of luggage full of presents and stocking stuffers one year. We had to come up with a good lie for it’s arrival on the 27th.

Good luck cleaning up. Do you still have raccoons for help?

caveadsum1471 said...

Unfortunate pipe leak, you seem to be keeping a good perspective on it though! Good luck with the rearguard action, I mean changing carpets is surely a spring kind of thing? So maybe April?!
Best Iain

marinergrim said...

Get a new carpet and at the same time drop a hint about extending and refurbishing the whole area?
Hope it works out for you.

TamsinP said...

Excuses, excuses, all these excuses ;)

Here's hoping you can get it sorted quickly and without too much expense.

BigLee said...

Ugh, Water! It gets everywhere and is a lot more troublesome than expected. Many years ago we had a tiny water leak from a pipe under our kitchen. It was a tiny leak but had gone undetected for a long time. The result was the entire downstairs floor and most of the wall plaster having to be removed and replaced. In total three months of disruption, and all over Christmas. That was a holiday season we won't forget in a hurry!

Hope you get yours sorted a little quicker.

Hearts said...

Best of luck with it all. Hope everything works out alright.

Miles said...

Thanks for the comments - The leak is fixed and most of the damage has been cleaned up. I'll need to retreat the carpet again but no biggie. While I lost the battle on replacing the carpet (we will) I sis win on timing - April!