We had lived in a series of rentals before we had our own place built, and many of these were old houses on their last legs.

There was one house in particular that we rented because it had mosaic tile floors, a large yard with fruit trees around the house and a Bermuda grass lawn in front. It was newly painted and, although we knew it was fifteen years old, we didn’t suspect that it had anything intrinsically wrong with it.

We had already settled in and were starting to add our own personal touches to the house décor when we had our first inkling of the problems to come.

There was water on the bedroom floor. At first, we thought it was because it had just heavily rained and there was condensation, but it worsened after a series of sunny days, and the tiles started to loosen. We pulled up the tiles and saw that the under surface was the old wooden flooring, rotting in places.

We found out that the water pipes, which were embedded under the floors and in the concrete walls, were made of PVC which had become brittle through the years and cracked.

Instead of changing the plumbing, the owners had just tiled over the wood.

We thought of by-passing the interior plumbing with exposed pipes until we saw the condition of the pipes coming in from the water main under the road.

We had to move out, but the experience served to make us aware so that  we involved ourselves more in the building of our own house, and, before choosing flooring material, we made sure that no pipes ran under the floors.