On Tuesday we had the Lowe's subcontractor install a new hot water heater, but alas!

After he took out the old decrepit one and hooked up a droid-like replacement - and turned on the outlet feed to the house - we found that the output pipe didn't exactly hold water. It had a large rust-colored area through which water somehow dropped straight down onto the new tank.

Well *there's* your problem...

(The leak might have caused all the corrosion on top of the water heater, but perhaps not. It seems that water heaters usually fail after 12-15 years and ours was 20 years old, so just as well to replace it now and have something shiny to show potential house buyers.)

Thus, we've been living the week without hot water in the house. Baby had one hot bath via kitchen-stove-heated water in a pan (then dumped into the tub), while Shelley and I have had one or two showers care of the gyms where we work.

The water heater guy was not allowed to work on our plumbing, but we finally had a plumber over today to deal with the pipe. We waited with bated breath while he took out the leaky one, worried terribly that removing it would cause the next joint down the line (and inside the wall) to crack, break, or leak, and so on - cascading through the house as one piece of rusty pipe failed after another.

Luckily that did not turn out to be the case so we're back in hot water.