Disclosure: This post is brought to you by Aramendia Houston. The opinions shared here are 100% mine.

No matter where you live, from Houston, TX to Kingsport, TN, home ownership can be a lot of stress and expense. At our house, Murphy’s Law (home improvement department) seems to take effect mostly on holidays. There was the year when the toilet got completely stopped up by a travel-sized bottle of baby powder — on Christmas Day. Then we had the year when the outdoor water spigot burst on Father’s Day. And we can’t forget the year that the water line decided to erupt on Halloween. While most people look forward to holidays, we tend to wonder what each one has in store for us.

You might look at this photo of my front yard and wonder why we let the grass get so long. Or maybe you noticed the blueberry bushes we planted last fall. What you probably didn’t wonder was, what lies beneath that hill? Well, I’ll tell you what. We buried $2000 in that hill!

No, we’re not anti-bank. We’re not stashing money in a mattress. That $2000 is not in cash. A lot of expensive pipes are resting below that grassy calm.  To be exact, $2000 worth of pipes. You see, on a dark Halloween night in 2005, we got home from trick-or-treating and noticed that there was a slight hum at the water line. It’s probably good that it was Halloween; otherwise we might not have been out by the water meter at that time of night. My husband went out with a flashlight and all, coming back to report that the water meter was running like crazy. Like the domestic goddess that I am, I had no idea that the water line even ran in front of our house. Somehow the water just gets piped in, kind of like sunshine through the windows. By morning’s first light we called a local plumber who determined that  our water line had decided to clock out. The plumber had to rent a Bobcat and dig up the entire front of our lawn to find and replace the pipe. Approximately $2000 later, we had a new water line. Something that we couldn’t even see and might not have noticed until weeks later had been a costly fix.

The plumber told us that the construction taking place down the street was likely to blame for our misfortune. Although I had never really thought about it before he mentioned it, we did seem to notice a slight decrease in the water pressure while taking a shower. Apparently the new construction being built just a block away had caused our water line to be impacted below the earth where no one could see. We had been lucky to catch it fairly early and that the fix was somewhat easily repaired. Some repairs are not so simple to find. For example, if we had experienced a foundation leak it might have taken much longer to diagnose.  Heating and air conditioning problems can be a crisis as well.  My husband and I aren’t equipped to handle situations that would require us to repair our units ourselves.   That’s why we trust our local professionals to help us maintain the safety and integrity of our home. Letting an expert deal with the issues like slab leak detection helps give us the peace of mind that our home is well maintained.