My long lost friend...hot water.

These are not the kind of before and after pictures I like to take..this was a big expense, a huge inconvenience, and the outcome adds neither increased functionality or aesthetics to our home, but it was a project that taught us another lesson in the woes of home ownership.
The back of our hot water heater blew out, and had slowly been leaking in the laundry room/bathroom and also through the wall into our bedroom. Instead of boring you with all the details, here are a few things we learned from this experience.
-I am quite allergic to mold. We found that it had been leaking for about a month (definitely enough time to build up quite the variety of molds) and I have been having serious difficulty breathing. I was glad to find out it was allergies not lung cancer or something crazy.
-Grant got to learn to solder. He is a lucky guy. Loves buying tools and gets all these legitimate reasons to buy new ones. Why can't there be a crisis that requires me to buy new shoes? :)
-A hot water heater is probably the least exciting appliance to buy. It sits deep in the back of a closet, and even though it's prettier than the old one, we hardly ever see it and it functions just the same as the old one.
-Be careful what you wish for. I was mad when Grant was commissioned into the military and I found out that we got a 10% discount on Lowe's because I thought about all the money we could have saved last summer...well this gave us an excuse to save on a big expense.
-We have the greatest friends ever! Thank you Karrie and Al for turning over your bathroom to us for 2 weeks. We will miss seeing you every morning :) And thank you to everyone else who offered up your water to us!
-Dishes take FOREVER when you have to use cold water.
-Pay attention to the church lessons you accept to teach. Grant had to given a lesson on "Trials" the Sunday after all this happened. I guess he didn't have any other good trial stories to tell, so something bad had to happen for him to have a good story to tell!
-We didn't need our water storage to drink, but rather used it to flush our toilets when the water was turned off for 2 days. Definitely not a fun situation, but glad we had the water on hand.
...I could probably go on with so many other things we learned, but this has been long enough already. Here are just a few pictures of the experience :)

On the bright side, we got to tile underneath where the water heater goes. We had to just tile up to it before and got to fully complete the project now.

Grant's amazing soldering work thanks to his new big torch and solder materials :)

The new fat water heater... although I was not excited to replace it, I am SO excited about hot showers and baths, not freezing my hands off when practicing proper hand hygiene to prevent the flu, and to be able to use the dishwasher and wash dishes again.Yeah for hot water!!! Don't take it for granted.