Plumbing Leak in the Ceiling - AGAIN

Late afternoon Wednesday my ears were drawn to a drip-drip sound coming from the kitchen. The water had been off for several hours as plumbers fixed a leak in a neighboring building. (Some of the mains in our community have broken or missing valves, so sometimes fixing a problem in one building requires shutting off water to multiple buildings.) I wondered if maybe I left the faucet in the kitchen open slightly and now water was flowing again. No... it was a leak. A leak from the ceiling. Water was dripping down from the ceiling of our kitchen pantry. Yes, this is the same pantry where we just got a leak fixed a few days ago! 😡

Instead of creating a bulge in the painted drywall like the last leak, this one was pouring out through the fixture around the fire sprinkler. No, the sprinkler itself wasn't running; water was pouring out around it. That indicated water was leaking somewhere in the wall, flowing along the pipe, and coming out through the ceiling where there's an opening for the sprinkler.

Well, it's a good thing I've been lazy about putting the shelves back in our pantry after it was finished on Monday. If I'd put everything back in there Monday or Tuesday, I'd have had to take it all back out Wednesday.

We called the property management company to report the problem. They got in touch with the owner of the plumbing company that fixed our leak. The owner himself would come out Wednesday night to diagnose the problem— to determine if it's a failure in the repair his team just finished, or some odd consequence of the water shutoff on Wednesday, or a completely unrelated new problem that just coincidentally happened on the heels of the previous problems.

Good News/Bad News: Washing Machine Leak

When I spotted a new leak in the ceiling of the kitchen pantry yesterday, I was pissed. Pissed, because it was just two days after we'd finished getting another leak repaired. A repair that we'd waited 8 weeks to get started. And this new leak was occurring just 2 feet over from the previous one! Had the repairmen screwed up the repair that badly?

I did a bit of troubleshooting on the problem myself. It didn't seem like it was the same leak as before just 2 feet over. It seemed like it might actually be a problem with the washing machine... which, yes, is about 2 feet over from where the toilet upstairs is! But could it really be such a coincidence that our washer sprung a leak right after the toilet was fixed? And right after plumbers were working on the water main outside all day? I was too pissed to want to run a full troubleshooting process myself. Thankfully the owner of the plumbing company agreed to come over.

The plumber and I worked through the troubleshooting process together. He saw my reason for suspecting the washing machine— dampness on the floor underneath it— and helped me shift it around a bit to pinpoint the problem more precisely. It wasn't a loose hookup problem or a leak in a supply hose or drain hose. It was some kind of leak from the body of the washing machine itself.

So, good news/bad news: It's not a plumbing leak. It won't be another $13,000 job that takes 8 weeks to schedule. But it looks like now we need to buy a new washer.