Sunday morning, I went down to our basement to get something.

I don’t remember what I was looking for, but the basement plays an important role in our 1,000-square foot house. Even though the basement is unfinished (we would finish it into a rec room if we had the money), it has electric and heat. We currently use the basement for holiday and camping equipment storage, a pantry, a place to keep our tool box and paint buckets, a tornado shelter, and a sort-of office area (although we usually bring any work we are doing to the dining table).

At least one of us is in the basement at least once a day.

Sunday morning, I went to the basement and noticed a small puddle of water underneath the hot water heater.

Uh-oh.

My husband had just woken up and I was going to be out and about for awhile. I told him we needed to check on that water heater later in the day.

When I returned home, I noticed the puddle had grown. I grabbed an old cake pan to put under the hot water heater. The goal was to limit the water damage to the cement floor. In the meantime, I started to move critical things away from the water heater such as two dining table chairs that we only bring upstairs when needed but would be expensive to replace if damaged.

My husband found where the dripping water was coming from – the joint between a section of metal pipe and the 90-degree angle loop that fed the water into the hot water tank.

We couldn’t find anything to fit under the pipe to catch those drips. Although my cake pan on the floor caught some of the water as it dribbled off the water heater, it wasn’t getting all of it.

We’ve been homeowners for only four years, and lived in Monroe for eight years. So we don’t have a list of local contractors to call in various circumstances. I’ve saved some contractor business cards from Home Builders Association of Monroe shows, but in this situation we had very little go to on.

Basically we went through the Yellow Pages in the phone book to see if there was any business whose name we recognized or had heard of before.

There was no answer at the first plumbing business I called.

At the time, we thought we could wait until Tuesday morning rather than pay higher fees for an emergency call on Memorial Day weekend; but I would have liked to get an appointment.

I called my parents in hopes of getting some idea what to do in the meantime. The phone got passed to my brother-in-law. He suggested I go to the hardware store and pick up some plumber’s putty or tape for a temporary fix until we could get a plumber on site.

I bought some repair tape for $5. But as my husband started to loop the tape around the leak, the dripping got worse.

There was no question what had to be done – we needed a plumber NOW!

We went back to the Yellow Pages. Someone did answer at one of the phone numbers. She contacted her plumber on call. He called us back in a few minutes to get the details. He was at another customer’s house at the time, but we’d be his next stop.

We paid $225 for the plumber to isolate the problem, take apart the piping and clean and re-connect the joint with a better seal. It didn’t take very long to fix. The way we see it: we paid for his expertise, not just his time.

That repair bill would have been much worse had we not noticed the problem during the first 24 hours and called for help as soon as possible.

The plumber said had we left it alone for a couple of days, the drippy water would have caused so much damage to the hot water heater that we would have needed to replace the entire unit rather than just fix a seal on the pipe leading into it.

And here I was worried about household stuff that might be damaged from a wet floor.