Frankenstein's Monster

For the past 2 days I have been posting about my hot water issues.  Chad the plumber ended up plumbing us for $935 in addition to our needing to buy a new water heater & an expansion tank.  He finished his work at 7:30 last night & told us that we could take hot showers this morning.

As I previously indicated, our water tank sits in our laundry room.  It will forever baffle me why it wasn't installed in a corner of the garage but this is central Kentucky for you.  The furnace, which as you know needs to have the filter changed every 2 months or so, is installed underneath the house in the crawlspace.  We have to crawl on our hands & knees on top of gravel & past some pretty questionable arachnids, praying all the while that they don't attack us, to the center of the crawlspace whenever we need to change the filter.  I once had to have a heating & cooling guy come here to fix a problem with the furnace.  When I asked him what in the world they were thinking when they put the furnace underneath the house like that, he said "That's the way we do it here!"

Okay ... back to Frankenstein's monster.  My laundry room is never going to be included in a photo spread about laundry rooms in any prim decorating magazine.  I've always thought it has possibilities but of course we don't intend on staying here so decorating is the last thing on my mind.  The photos below were taken last March.  You can see a bit of the old hot water tank tucked into a corner just past the door in the last photo.  

Next is a full photo of the old hot water tank which again was tucked into a corner just past the door.  It's definitely not pleasing to the eye but it didn't accost you when you walked into the room & cause you anxiety or disgust of any kind.  

  

Following is the new hot water heater.  Because of the expansion tank requirement, Chad had to move the tank out of the corner & away from the wall toward the center of the room well over a foot.  This also brought the drip pan (or whatever it's called) farther away from the wall toward the center of the room.  Chad also had to solder on additional copper pipe in order to connect the tank to the wall pipes.  Here's what we've got now.  

     

You might be thinking "Oh, that's not too bad!"  Trust me, it's bad.  Pictures don't show the true horror of it.  It's the first thing you see when you walk in the room because you almost bump into it.  You can even see it when you pass by the laundry room door.  I told John that when we go to sell the house next March, people will be walking through here saying "Oh, what a nice home this is!"  Then they'll get to the laundry room & beat a hasty retreat out of here never to be heard from again   : (

Oh a happier note, we did indeed have hot water this morning & it was coming out of the shower head with such gusto that I swear there must be little bruises all over my body!  I just wish a monster wasn't providing it to us.