Don Vandervort, Head Homeboy, has written more than 30 DIY home improvement books, been a segment host on HGTV, served as MSN.com's home improvement expert and written countless magazine articles.
Avoid a river in your hallway: Take your mother to dinner.
Never leave your 60 year old mom home alone when the pipes break. Sure, you can’t know when they’re going to break. But you can pretty much gamble, that if you’re going out for a holiday dinner at your in-laws house, your mom is going to be blasted in the face with freezing cold water while you’re gone.
It’s no surprise that my mom was at home in her long, velvet house robe, doing a load of laundry before we all came home that night. What was a shock to her (and us, when we got home) was turning on the washer and accidentally starting a torrential flood.
We only know how to turn off the water at the street, which is under a heavy metal plate and requires a solid steel key to turn. My mom doesn’t know where any of this is. Mistake number one. Mistake number two: Don’t hook the strap of a bra on a washer faucet and pull it off without thinking. This pulled the end of the pipe off for my mom, and had a shooting stream of cold water spraying her (and the wall and the hallway and the floor) at high pressure. For an HOUR.
Being alone, she instantly blocked the water with her hands, shooting back into the wall. Then she held it there, hoping we’d come home. In November. A frail woman, in a sponge-like velvet dress that soaked up gallons of water.
She managed to run to the phone to call us, hysterical, and then run back to the shooting water. We got home and found a shivering, shocked mother and a river in our hallway and bathroom. We carried her off to dry clothing, and to un-numb her frozen hands. Months later, the ceramic tiles are loose from the flood. The homeowner’s insurance people say the damage is bad but not bad enough to use our deductible. Oh, and now that we’ve mentioned the damage, we better fix it or they won’t insure us.
We showed her how to turn off the water. Now, when we go to dinner, we take her along.
