Near disaster in the layout room!

Well yesterday started out as a harmless day and quickly escalated into a major problem.  I was peddling in the layout room/office and decided to take out a shelf under my layout.  The shelf was one like I have above my layout or like the ones that attach to the wall in closets.  No telling why I put this in but I did it about a year ago.  So, I started removing a screw that I thought was in a stud. As I removed it, a fine stream of water sprayed right in my eye and across the room.

PANIC ensued!

I screamed to my wife upstairs and she came running as did the kids.  She thought I chopped off my finger.  No, worse.  I knew I had to cut the water off some how.  While she caught and blocked the stream of water, I ran to the utility room and cut the valves off of the mud sink and water heater.  The room is right on the other side of the wall from the leak.   Then it dawned on me, run outside to the crawl space and cut the main water valve off from the well.  That did it.  Think I did all that in about minute to 90 seconds.

So I had water everywhere.  First thoughts were having to rip out the wall that support the major part of the layout. Flooding out the whole house and ruining the new laminate floor that I just put in.  An insurance claim.  I was thinking the worse.    It was not as bad as I thought.  Had some storage boxes get a little wet as did few other things, nothing major.  The carpet was the worst off.  It was soaked in a 4X7 section.   This was the third time in the last 3-4 years that my carpet has got wet from a leak.  First was from the dog chewing the plastic water line to the mud sink.  The second was when the water heater went out.  Both of these were in the mud room, on the other side of this leak.

So how to fix it?  Well, I am very thankful to my dad.  He's in his mid 70's and still the craftiest and biggest problem solver I know.  I called him and after a brief conversation, he was headed here.  I made sure we had everything we needed.  I had most of what we needed since he installed my water heater.  So I gathered up most of the towels we had in the house and put them in the office to soak up the water from the carpet.  Beach towels work well!  After we cut the drywall out, I notice my aim was dead on on the pipe.  The hole was perfectly in the middle of it.  Would have never know if I did not remove it.  Kinda scary.

Right below St. Just is the leak.  That hole in the drywall.  

Little did I know I have TWO leaks!  Did the same thing to the right.

The kids and my wife helped me move the stuff in that area to the kids playroom.  Luckily most of it was moved since I was removing the shelf.  

Here's my wonderful dad cutting the pipe so we can put in a new section.  Luckily it was a workable area and reachable.  

Had to remove a good section of drywall.  I was worried about the other screw and decided to check the pipe to make sure.  It had a hole in it too.  Notice the metal plates to protect the pipe in the stud.

Last night and today is drying day.  Used these fans along with a steam vacuum to remove/dry it out.

Thinking about laying laminite florring in here now.  Glad I didn't install it yet.  

Now I guess I need to work on my drywall patch skills.  So the moral of the story:  Make sure you know what your drilling into before hand!  This goes for electrial lines too!

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Another busy week coming up and a major upgrade to the layout room!

Looking at this coming week, modeling is going to take a back seat.  It seems that I have something to do every night this week.  Between 2 football games, 2 little league ball games and practices, free time will be nonexistent.  I hoped to get back into the modeling grind this week, but this past week was also busy.  Guess I will have to get modeling in in small increments!  I have no major projects for the Midland for this winter, but I will start to figure out where scenery will begin on the lower level.  St. Just is a good starting point and I may do a tweek in the trackage there to hide the helix hole.  This will extend the run-around track and I will widen the area right above my desk.  This will give me a chance to add trees to block the "hole in the wall".

I also purchased some laminate flooring for the layout room.  The carpet in the office has ran it's course so it needs to go.  This is the same flooring my wife and I installed in our family/TV room this summer.  It holds up well and is scratch resistant.  It should not take too longer to install but the hard part will be putting it under the layout legs. I may remove them or jack them up a bit.  It should look and do well in the layout room as long as I don't have any more leaks.

Here's the hole to the garage and the helix.  No easy way to hide it from view.  The plan is to widen this area and put some trees in the foreground to hopefully hide it.

I may remove this curved turnout and extend the runaround track to the right, making it bigger.

Mainline on the right, Mine run branch on the left.  Putting the turnout down here would make this runaround track more worth while.

There is the propane turnout in the same area but this will stay in the same area.

This Traffic Master laminate flooring has done great in our family room.  I chose a lighter color for the layout room so it will match our foyer flooring.

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