The Mystery of the Water in the Kitchen

A few times over the last few weeks I have found water in my kitchen: on the bench around the sink, on the floor in front of the sink and the washing machine. (And yes, I mean washing machine and not dishwasher.) Usually these discoveries were made first thing in the morning. But I had no idea where the water came from. Occasionally I have heard a drip, again always during the night. It was usually a small puddle, which dried quickly during the morning.

It was an odd occurrence, but it didn’t seem too serious. Sometimes I thought it was just the overflow from the sink when I washed dishes in the evening, only to be found in the morning.

To the left, the 'cupboard' with some metal around the edge is the fridge.

To the right of the stove is a wall. It's a fairly narrow space!

But I woke up at 4:30am on Monday morning to the sound of water dripping. I reluctantly got up and went to the kitchen to see what was happening.

I found a small lake.

There was hardly any dry floor between the washing machine, the stove and the wall. So I grabbed the bathroom mat to try to soak up as much of the water as possible, then tried to find the source of that dripping.

Again, it eluded me.

I made sure the washing machine was properly off. I shifted the tap on the kitchen sink around, and tried to make sure that was closed as much as possible too. A few minutes later I realised the dripping sound had stopped. So I went back to bed.

In the morning there was still a small lake in my kitchen. The bathroom mat was soaked through, so I put that back in the bathroom to dry out (which took forever) and grabbed the mop and bucket and mopped up as much as I could before I had to go to class.

The director of the course, who is a friend of my landlady, came to have a look after class. He thought the problem would be the washing machine – but it wasn’t. All the pipes under the sink were dry. He checked under the floor of the cupboard beneath the sink, and still couldn’t see any source of the water. But we could hear an occasional dripping!

Eventually the source was discovered: the kitchen tap. A tiny dribble of water ran from the lever down the base of the tap, forming a small pool around the tap on the bench. We never did quite figure out exactly how the water then made its way to the floor.

Mystery solved, two plumbers arrived the following evening, replaced the whole tap, and thankfully there have been no more mysterious manifestations of water on the kitchen floor.