Water Damaged Ceiling and Repairs

Awhile back Tony noticed a water stain in the foyer. It wasn't huge, but he pointed it out to me and while we made a mental note of it, it was all but forgotten when the holidays rolled around. Not long after Christmas I happened to look up and the water stain had grown. A lot. In many places. So, where we had started with one small problem we now had a pretty big problem.

I called our contractor and he came right out to see if he could find the problem. He had to cut a hole in our bathroom closet to get to the pipes around the bathtub and when he saw that completely dry, he was puzzled. He checked a few other things but when everything looked dry he only had one thing left to do and that was to cut away at the ceiling to find the leak. But, there wasn't any visible problem there either aside from the water stains of the drywall. Four (large) holes later he still couldn't find the leak. He ran a full tub of water, ran the shower, ran the washing machine which is also above the water stained area but nothing. Not a single drip. It was quite perplexing. He ended up leaving after 2 hours and told me that if I saw anything dripping to give him a call and he'd come back out. We didn't want to repair the ceiling and have it leak again so we decided to just leave it all the way it was and see what happened.

We decided to also have our insurance company come out and have a look since our contractor hadn't been able to pin point the issue. The insurance guy showed up and did most of the same tests that Tom did but because there were already large holes in the ceiling his job was a little easier. He couldn't find a problem either so he called his boss who then showed up to help find the leak. Still nothing. After lots of thinking and all these people looking into the cause of the problem, Tony told them that our overflow cap had been loose and spun around sometimes so that the drain part was facing upwards. (He'd mentioned this before to them but they weren't convinced it was what the problem was.)  We came to the conclusion that when Landon takes his LOOOONGGGGG showers, the water was running down the wall and into the drain part of the overflow cap and running along the pipes in the floor/ceiling and spreading water everywhere. So, there wasn't just one spot where the water pooled but many spots where it trickled along the pipes through the foyer and dining room. Not sure if all that makes sense but WHAT A MESS.

Anyways, today, after having exposed pipes in the ceiling for what feels like forever, our contractor came out to fix it all. They had to replace all the drywall of course and then because we have a very open floor plan there was lots of painting to do. The ceiling is connected all the way from the kitchen to the opposite end of the house at the library. So the library, dining room, hallway and kitchen ceilings have to be painted. They're also going to paint my scrapbook room ceiling because when I had the recessed lights installed it was never done and I figured it was time.

They taped up plastic to cover everything, put down tons of drop cloth and the drywall has been fixed. They started painting today too but there were only two of them so it isn't quite done. They plan to come out tomorrow morning to finish...