Bloodless Coup

if it makes you feel any better, i had a pipe freze burst in my problem back room yesterday. fortunately, a) i can segregate that room so it didn't force me to shut down the entire house's plumbing and b) i already had a plumber coming over today to estimate setting up a dishwasher, ironically directly on the other side of the wall where the pipe burst. i'm hoping to come up with a global solution, since they'll be in that wall anyway.

meanwhile, who knew: a pipe can burst with such force that the water punhes a hole right through sheetrock.

It's an interior wall and the pipe burst? Does that room have insulation and a heat source? A friend of ours here had faucets start leaking because the washers got so cold they become brittle and snapped, but the pipes themselves didn't burst.

i have a single story, uninsulated back room that serves as washroom and half bath. it has no cellar, and just rests above a very shallow crawl space. the first freezing incident -- basically of the washer splitting variety -- occurred over thanksgiving weekend with the first (and until this weekend last) serious sub-freezing weather. i've made the room functional with the temporary fix of a big space heater, with the intent to install a couple of baseboard heaters this summer (i was all set to do it in november, but while home depot sold the $150 of electric equipment i needed to run a 240V circuit, as well as the heater itself, they didn't carry the thermostat necessary to regulate a 240V appliance, and so the whole plan was untimely derailed and i fell back to plan B in frustration).

anyway, this has proved sufficient all winter, bu evidently not when the temperature approaches zero. the pipes that froze run naked through the crawlspace, and then up the wall that separates the house from the addition. that wall, indeed the whole addition, is uninsulated, so it was obviously just funneling a cold updraft from the crawlspace.

the whole house needs to be insulated, but at the urging of my contractor father, i'll probably not do that job until i'm prepared to replace 8 or 10 of the worst windows, either this summer or next. obviously, the back room needs more immediate attention, although thankfully zero-degree temperatures are passingly rare here.

Hold up on the whole house insulation. My sister is a historic preservation architect, and she has given me quite a lecture on the way houses were designed to function, and how retrofitting insulation isn't always a good idea. If you want, next time we show up at the same cocktail party, I can repeat to you what she told me (and what convinced me not to insulate my 100 year old beast).

i'll certainly hear you out -- insulation won't happen until i can get a nice little improvement loan to do a couple of major jobs (windows, bathroom) -- but you're going to have a hard time convincing me that woodframe walls with empty space between clapboard and plaster are no more expensive to heat than they would be if packed with insulation, especially when my contractor father, who's been doing high-end renovations and additions on old houses like this for most of my life, opines to the contrary. blown insulation is insanely cheap, and even newspaper would be better in the walls than nothing. and did i mention that my pipes are freezing!?

Yeah, but apparently these houses were designed to breathe, and filling in that space can result in more negative things than higher gas bills (like in wall mold).