Well… Murphy came to visit this weekend. Luckily, we were mostly prepared for him.

We are hosting a foreign exchange student from Belgium for the semester and on Saturday we planned to be tourists for the day in San Francisco. Before we left, my husband went out to the fridge in the garage to grab something and found water all over the ground. Apparently, our hot water heater was leaking. We actually think we caught it pretty early, which is a blessing!

My husband attached a hose to it to drain it and called my brother, who owns a plumbing company, to ask some questions. He then had us call my nephew (who works for him) to order a new water heater. The upshot of it is, it’s being delivered and installed today, and it didn’t ruin our plans to go to SF.  We are also very lucky to have generous neighbors who we are close to who allowed us to shower in their house. We were like a parade going in and out on both Saturday and Sunday nights.

We could have gotten a water heater yesterday from Home Depot and been in business one day sooner, but we decided the cost savings was worth it to wait one more day… in both time and money. We will get the water heater at cost and my nephew, who is a plumber, will install it for us. My husband will help, but the learning curve will not be there because he isn’t doing it himself. (My husband is very handy and takes on a lot of home repairs. But sometimes, we choose to leave things to the professionals. Especially when they are our brothers and nephews!)

As you all know, we are in credit card debt, but about 6 months ago we started some new sinking funds, two of which were appliances and home repair so, coming up with the money won’t be an issue because it’s already there. I will be sad to part with it but am SO happy we have it. What could have been a major setback (especially to our hearts and minds) just became a relatively minor inconvenience.

We were able to play tourists for the day and not stress too much about our water heater issue. We had a jam-packed day in San Francisco. We visited and walked over the Golden Gate Bridge, drive down Lombard Street, climbed to the top of Coit Tower (the only touristy thing I had not done before, I’d been there but never to the top), ate clam chowder on Pier 39, played games at the Musee Mecanique, walked around Fisherman’s Wharf, and ended with dinner in North Beach, which was a special request from our student who loves Italian food! It started out rough but ended up being a great day!

We don’t know the final cost yet of our water heater, but we will pay it and keep plugging away, at both our debt and replenishing our sinking funds!