What's That Noise?
We've all been in the car and heard a noise. Someone in the car will say, 'What's that noise?' and you'll do process of elimination until you figure out that it's the soda can rolling around under the back seat.
Well, what if you hear a noise in your house? Don't ignore it. We had a noise in our house once. It sounded like water was dripping, but we could never figure out where. There were no water stains, no puddles. Eventually, the sound just blended in with all of the other sounds in the house, babies crying, microwave ovens running, TVs and stereos.
Eventually, we ignored it, and figured that, whatever it was, it was no big deal. That is, until we got our water bill the next quarter. Our water bills were generally pretty uneventful. There were just three of us, and we weren't even home much during the day. This one water bill was almost as big as our mortgage payment! That's when we decided something was wrong!
It turned out we needed to replace some fairly inexpensive parts in our upstairs toilet. We spent about $20 at the hardware store and about two hours of our time on a Saturday morning. The noise went away. Our next water bill was back to normal. It was a very expensive lesson. Now, we never ignore noises in our house, we always investigate!