I will see your roadwork and raise you!

Bed & Breakfast / Short Term Rental Host Forum

Help Support Bed & Breakfast / Short Term Rental Host Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

gillumhouse

Moderator
Staff member
Moderator
Joined
May 22, 2008
Messages
16,103
Reaction score
756
I have a full house. I am making breakfast and hear water dripping in the dining room. I hear the shower above me. I have a waterfall in the dining room! The last time I had that happen honeymooners decided to share the claw-foot tub that in not even in that bathroom now.
I get towels and start mopping up. Run upstairs and ask the poor lady in the shower to please stop. She is apologetic. I am the one apologizing!!!
Come downstairs and put a pan under (brain finally kicked in - DUH!) and go back to get breakfast in oven for 8:15 breakfast. (It is now 9AM and they are not down yet - and breakfast is an egg bake that will now be like shoe leather on top of everything else). Ka-thud! The ceiling tile comes crashing down!!!
Now I can see the problem - the drain and the drainpipe have parted company. I now have 2 emergency calls in to the plumbing shop (closed Saturday of course), called the owner at home - voice mail, called the woman who works in the office - voice mail, and am ready to spit nails because I cannot remember anyone's name that works there, breakfast is a disaster, and I cannot do anything about it!! After breakfast I will put the ladder up again and see if I can figure out how to attach the pipe to the collar..... I would settle for them tearing up my street right now!
WAH-WAH-WAH-WAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!
 
OMG and you had time to tell us all about it...you are cooler than a cucumber:) Hope it all works out ok.
 
Well they requested breakfast at 8:15 (the other room at 9:30). They FINALLY came down at 9:15 (the 9:30 had been down for coffee and said she would just eat with them so I put her breakfast in with theirs - mistake).
I had cleaned up the mess (that Shark sweeper is great - it vacc'ed up the pieces of ceiling tile with no noise) and was waiting for the guests, and waiting, and waiting.... They are all at the table now - gaping hole in the ceiling, english muffin bread hard as a rock, egg bake like leather..... Breakfasts do not hold for an hour..... even bread pudding would have been dry as dust by then!
I just saw a plumbing truck go by!! I think he was going to the shop for supplies - I HOPE!! I moved my car so he can have the driveway. Results later.
 
I
541922.gif
to you....
I'm not worthy....I'm not worthy
 
How do you keep from ass-chewing your guests when they arrive an hour late for breakfast, especially with the house literally falling down around you? I'd lose it.
angry_smile.gif
 
Holy smokes! You poor thing, I hope you get it resolved today so you can start the clean-up/repaint, etc. What a nightmare! Makes me glad I only had the power go out...plumbing is my worst nightmare!
And I must ask the same question as Proud Texan...how DO you keep from chewing them out when they've kept you waiting for an hour? Especially when you give them SO much leeway for breakfast to begin with? Talk about inconsiderate...
 
We are too small to do breakfasts at different times. We have 1 seating in the dining room at 9 am. Its 3 courses by candlelight. Chefs wim daily. No choices. We stall till 9:15 to give the straggles a chance, but after that ... your SOL. I don't have help except to serve. By 11 am its check out time and I clean until check in at 3. I just don't have the luxury to give guests a option.
My life is already too
465841.gif
 
We are too small to do breakfasts at different times. We have 1 seating in the dining room at 9 am. Its 3 courses by candlelight. Chefs wim daily. No choices. We stall till 9:15 to give the straggles a chance, but after that ... your SOL. I don't have help except to serve. By 11 am its check out time and I clean until check in at 3. I just don't have the luxury to give guests a option.
My life is already too
465841.gif
.
I only have 3 rooms so it is easier to offer THEIR TIME than if I had a large inn. It is cook's choice. I had originally planned to do panckes this morning and then I got the other 2 rooms - all one party thank goodness AND the lady that had originally booked had taken one of the rooms that shated a bath (the drain problem one) so the private bath was part of the multi-room group and they could use that shower. One of that party was taking the shower when all hell busted loose.
The lady in the Harris Room was a brick. I told her I could not charge her under the circumstances but she insisted on at least half rate - and she paid CASH! She said, "I was in the Air Force, I took a pan bath." She even talked about coming bzck with her husband. HER I am going to send a GC for the private, queen room at the shared rate on her next stay. She said she was in the restaurant business for 20 years and said she could not understand how they could request breakfast at one time and come down an hour later. Super nice. Oh, and the antique floor lamp in her room fell over and broke the shade last night and she offered to pay for it and I told her she would not - stuff happens. The darned lamp is now at the curb. It has been cursed since I got it 10 years ago.
The others are OK but I do not think they have ever been to a B & B before. Definitely motel people. They were really nice about the shower problem though.
Plumber arrived at 11 and was gone by 12. All fixed. Now I need to make a quite run to Lowe's to get a couple ceiling tile......
 
Holy smokes! You poor thing, I hope you get it resolved today so you can start the clean-up/repaint, etc. What a nightmare! Makes me glad I only had the power go out...plumbing is my worst nightmare!
And I must ask the same question as Proud Texan...how DO you keep from chewing them out when they've kept you waiting for an hour? Especially when you give them SO much leeway for breakfast to begin with? Talk about inconsiderate....
Had the mess cleaned up before they came down to breakfast. I just have to get 2 new ceiling tiles.
 
How do you keep from ass-chewing your guests when they arrive an hour late for breakfast, especially with the house literally falling down around you? I'd lose it.
angry_smile.gif
.
The fact they could not use one of the showers helped a LOT!
 
Hubs says to look on the bright side...because the tiles fell down you had easy access to the drain to get it repaired. (I can dope slap him if you want.)
 
Hubs says to look on the bright side...because the tiles fell down you had easy access to the drain to get it repaired. (I can dope slap him if you want.).
He is totally correct. It was when the tile fell that I knew what to do - scream help at a plumber. Just give him a hug and tell him he is correct as usual, King Friday. That is what I always tell DH.
The plumbers were happy to see how accessible the problem was.
 
Wow, you are so cool...there is no way I would be able to compose a sentence, well at least ones without a bunch of
potty-mouth.gif
.
One thing I was thinking...do I recall you haveing a plumbing problem before? If that is the case, why don't you install one of those trap doors on the ceiling making accessing it so much easier. We had to do that for one of our bathrooms that kept having problems...now that we have the trap door, yes you guessed it, no more problems!
 
Wow, you are so cool...there is no way I would be able to compose a sentence, well at least ones without a bunch of
potty-mouth.gif
.
One thing I was thinking...do I recall you haveing a plumbing problem before? If that is the case, why don't you install one of those trap doors on the ceiling making accessing it so much easier. We had to do that for one of our bathrooms that kept having problems...now that we have the trap door, yes you guessed it, no more problems!.
DH is going to eventually (or the kids will after he dies without having done it)make trap doors for the shower plumbing and under the sink in my bathroom. other than that ALL the plumbing in this house is accessible easily with the exception of the kitchen waterlines that are under the floor (it used to be the porch many years ago). The dining room ceiling (and our bedroom ceiling) was lowered due to plumbing probles before our time in the then only bathroom. That is why I was able to see what the problem was as soon as the tile came crashing down. I was looking directly at the shower drain plate IN the shower but from the underside!
I remembered taking a ceiling tile upstairs when we replaced the dining room ceiling in 2006. Went up and did a rearrange of the storage room as DH calls it (I call it the
potty-mouth.gif
Fibber MaGee room) and sure enough, tucked against the back wall for protection was one of the old tiles. Tomorrow after my guests leave, I will make the Lowe's run and get 4 tiles. 3 to replace the damage from today (2 are buckled but still up - so far) and one for spare just in case.
I am sooooo glad it is over - I hope.
 
Yikers!! What's the update??.
Oh, sorry. Forgot to get back to this. My local plumber was in Cincinatti, I saw one of his trucks at the Fire Dept and got him over here only to discover he himself was NOT a plumber, that is how I found out the owner was out of town and bit of the other guys that worked for him were also. I found out he last the name of a man who used to work there - I could only remember his first name - and he ALSO was voice mail. (Edited to add that my local guy called me in the afternoon when he got home to see what the problem was - I had left a message at his house - and he was concerned that his emergency system did not call him when I accessed the emergency line and left 2 separate messages. He was thanking me for alerting him to a problem on his end.)
I got out the phone book and started making calls. As I was working my way down the list the best of them called back. Two guys arrived at 11.
One of them told DH the drain had been attached with a "friction" method and had a gasket that was supposed to help maintain the hold. It apparently was mangled (thank you high-priced deconstructors - more evidence of shoddy work at a platinum price) and let loose. It is now GLUED and should not come loose again. They were done & gone by Noon. I shudder to think what that bill is going to be.
I found one of the old ceiling tiles in the Fibber MaGee Room upstairs - in rearranging the crap in it to get to the tile I got to a cabinet DH built and checked to see what I had stashed in it. WOW, found some slothes I had taken from the closet because they did not fit. Am wearing one pair of slacks now - need to try on the others so some good may have come of it all after all! So in the next few weeks, I need to go get 3 more ceiling tile to replace the damaged ones and put the old spare back for next time.
All my guests were bricks about the whole thing. The stayovers got a story to tell everyone. 2 of them had stayed at other B & Bs and told me this one was great - even with the gushing shower.
 
Back
Top