January 11, 2024 will be remembered as a traumatic day.
This day was Thursday, so we had no CrossFit class. We had breakfast on the couch as usual and when I went into the room to brush my teeth and get ready, I found everything flooded.
At first, I thought the water had come out of the dehumidifier, but I saw that the dehumidifier had no water around it.
I went to the bathroom and saw that water was gushing out of one of the bidet pipes, I tried to turn off the water and the whole pipe got caught in my hand and even more water started coming out.
I yelled at Diego to run and cut off the water of the house.
It is worth noting that while in normal houses you can cut off the water flow to a single sector without having to cut off the water to the whole house, in Portugal the constructions are shitty, and everything is becoming more and more precarious; so, you have to go out to the street to cut off the water to the whole house.
In our apartments in Valencia, you could cut off the water to each bathroom separately or just to the kitchen.
After Diego cut off the water, we proceeded to dry everything that was flooded that reached under the bed.
I was terrified because as the houses in Porto are made of cardboard (plasterboard), everything could easily melt from the humidity.
At the same time, I was taking pictures and videos of everything to pass it on to the insurance company.
We noticed that the downstairs bathroom was leaking from the ceiling and everything was flooded.
While Diego was drying the downstairs, I was talking to my electrician to see if he could send someone urgently to change the pipe.
He told me that his colleague would call me, and I waited for hours.
Diego went out to ask for help to the neighbors who work in front making furniture and a man came to try to fix it, but he could not unscrew the broken piece that remained inside the pipe.
He told us that in Portugal they also used to make the installations so that the water could be cut off by sectors, but as the renovations and constructions became cheaper and cheaper, more and more things were removed, and the qualities became worse and worse.
In Porto most of the people who provide services work badly or are dedicated to swindling, so it is very difficult to find someone who works well. That’s why I asked my electrician to recommend someone I could trust.
Therefore, people who work well have a lot of work.
Since no one had contacted me by noon and we didn’t even have water to brush our teeth, I decided to look on fixando to see if someone could come urgently.
A man called me immediately and came to the house.
What had to be done was as simple as replacing the broken pipe, but as the walls are made of plasterboard and all the pipes are inside the wall loose without any support, the man could not get the broken piece that was inside the pipe to be able to replace the whole thing.
He told us that they were going to have to break the wall to be able to grab the pipe and take out the broken piece.
I told him to try to grab the pipe with a flange to see if he could unscrew the broken piece.
He succeeded, replaced the pipe, and put the bidet back in place.
What I figured was going to cost at most 70 euros, cost almost 400.
Just think, average salary in Portugal is 650 euros a month.
The man left and after cleaning it all up I noticed that the other pipe was now leaking.
It was not the pipe he had fixed, but from moving the bidet surely something had happened.
I called him to come as soon as possible, and, in the evening, he came and changed a rubber part of the pipe and it seemed to have solved the problem.
After this hellish day we got to thinking that since we had moved to Porto, we had never cut off the water when we went on vacation.
When we lived in Spain and even when I lived in Venezuela, we always cut off the water and turned off the electricity when we went on a trip.
In Porto, on the other hand, we had completely forgotten to do that.
What happened to us this day was like a call from destiny for us not to let our guard down in Porto.
As horrible and traumatic as this day had been, I felt fortunate that it happened when we were in the house, especially because in two days we were leaving for a trip to Cape Verde and if it had happened while we were traveling, the house would have been irrecoverable.
We passed the accident report to the insurance, and it was another disappointment when we realized that we had a deductible of 100 euros, so it was also a mental note to change to an insurance with no deductible.