What are you doing New Years; New Years Eve?

Di:  "rel, come here quick"!!!

Di is in the downstairs bathroom.  rel is sitting on the heat register in the adjacent living room.

rel:  "At my age quick doesn't compute.  What's the matter"?

Di:  "You're not going to be happy!"

Upon entering the bathroom my eyes follow the trajectory of her finger and I see a bulge in the ceiling of our recently remodeled bathroom and water is dripping down the wall and onto the storage cabinet.

Standing there, my mind awash in words and phrases not fit to print, Di says, "what are we going to do"?

I'm computing: Shut off the water to the upstairs bathroom.  Where is the shut off; is it in the cellar?  Did Willie leave the shutoffs in the laundry room during the renovation?  With due haste I make my way around the house to the laundry room and espy the shut off valves with bleeders and think OK good, but darn, OK I did say damn-it or some such superlative, the valves and bleeders were located behind the washer in the corner and nearly inaccessible.  But access  them I did and was able to shut off the valves and bleed the lines. 

Within the hour the bulge receded almost completely and by morning there was no longer any bulge.  Diane called the home of the contractor, who had done the renovation, and spoke to his wife and told her the situation.  She said she would tell her husband, when he returned, and have him call.  Di told her that we were going out to the neighbors for the evening and to have him call in the morning.

In retrospect it appears that we discovered the problem in its early stages.  My initial thought was a burst water pipe.  The puzzling thing about that, though, was that we've been through two winters prior to this one without problems and much colder temperatures then.

Willie came up the next morning and we trouble-shot the problem and found a small trickling leak where the water line feeds into the toilet reservoir.  Such a small leak failed to garner our notice he said because there was no accumulation of water on the floor.  Rather, the trickle just ran down the inlet hose and through the access hole in the  floor.

The good news is:  no frozen water pipes and minimal damage to the ceiling that willie says can be easily repaired when the leak area dries out.

A new toilet and pluming accoutrement's will be installed Wednesday.