The brown patch on the kitchen ceiling was the size of a side plate when I found it, at 11.20am on Friday 12 December, on my way down to put the kettle on. It was damp to the touch, and in the middle of it a single bead of water hung there, thinking about it. The bathroom is directly above the kitchen, and the patch sat right under the plughole end of the bath. I had showered at 6.50 that morning.
I didn't panic, much. A drip that only comes when water runs is a different problem from a burst pipe, and the stopcock stayed where it was. I took the screws out of the bath panel, got the head torch on, and ran the tap with the plug in. Then I pulled it. There, at the joint where the waste pipe meets the bath, a thin steady drip ran along the underside and soaked into the ceiling below.
The plumber
Hannah gave me the name of the plumber they used when they did their bathroom, and he came that afternoon at 3.20pm. It took him about forty minutes. The washer in the waste joint had perished, which is a polite word for hard, cracked and crusted with limescale, and he said it was probably original to the suite. He replaced it, sealed the joint and filled the bath to watch the water go down. Nothing dripped. I asked whether filling the bath for the sealant a couple of weeks earlier could have caused it, and he said no, it was simply the end of the washer's life. That £95 included the call-out, and I think it was a fair price on a Friday afternoon.
Once the patch had dried out over the weekend, I put stain block on it on Sunday afternoon (the smelly kind, with the kitchen window open), then two coats of ceiling paint on Sunday and Monday evenings. The paint and stain block came to £24. Together with the plumber that's £119, and the ceiling is white again. Matt walked underneath it on Tuesday morning and couldn't tell me where the stain had been, which is the best compliment a ceiling can get.
Why we didn't claim
The cover we have includes escape of water, and it carries a higher excess than the rest of the policy: £350. The whole bill was £119, so even if the insurer had said yes, we'd have been paying all of it. That made the decision for us. There's a second reason, which is that a claim can push up the renewal, and ours falls on 15 January. We had no claims in the first year, and I didn't want to spend that for the price of a washer.
I read the policy wording anyway, because that's the sort of person I am. As I understood it, escape of water is written around a sudden event, and a slow drip that has been going on for who knows how long might have been treated as gradual damage. The repair to the washer itself, the thing that had actually failed, wouldn't have been covered either. I'm not an insurer, and I could have read it wrongly, so check your own wording or ring your insurer if you're in the same spot.
What I'd tell the next quote form
Not claiming doesn't mean it didn't happen. Most quote forms ask about losses and incidents, not only about claims, so when we shop around in January we'll say that we had a leak and repaired it ourselves for £119. I'd rather declare it than have it come up later.
The thing I'd change is the ten minutes I spent hunting for a bucket and a towel with the water still dripping. There's now a small bowl and a spare torch in the bathroom cabinet. The bath panel is back on, but for an hour on Friday evening it stood against the wall, and Pickle spent most of that time sitting inside the gap under the bath as though it were a new room she had been waiting for.
