I spent Christmas Eve in a rather unusual place this year, one I hope not to return to in the near future.

While most folks were singing Christmas songs, unwrapping presents and sipping glasses of eggnog, I was crawling around under my house.

Of course, it didn’t start with that action. It all started more than a week ago with the arctic weather on Dec. 19 and 20.

It was so cold at my house that the cat froze stiff on the porch and I had to carry it in the house to thaw it out. The thermometer read -6, which is about 76 degrees colder than I like for it to be. It was so cold, in fact, that I think a saw a penguin in the back yard.

Adding to the problem, the wind was whipping around at high speed. All of this led my pipes to freeze, especially since I had carelessly failed to seal up my vents under the house. What, me forget?

Since I have those expandable plastic pipes, called Pex, that aren’t supposed to rupture like copper or CPVC, I figured everything would be fine. I opened the crawlspace, put my 55,000 BTU space heater under the house, and let it run for a few hours.

According to my calculations, a few hours of that much heat in that small a space should have thawed a small glacier. While the pipes did thaw, they did not recover completely.

The water started with a small trickle and eventually increased to a steady flow, although only about one- third the pressure I usually see when I turn on the faucet.

Since most of the pipes were insulated, I decided that maybe heat tapes would be the answer. The newspaper was closed last Thursday and Friday, so I took the opportunity to get a few things in order.

Thursday evening, I traveled to the really big hardware store to pick up some heat tapes and pipe insulation. Friday morning, after assembling mass quantities of Christmas toys, I put on my new Christmas work bibs and prepared for my journey under the house.

The water may not have been flowing through the pipes, but I did find one place it was flowing just fine. The sink drain vent under the house had developed a leak and a small swamp was in place near one end of the house. I started on the other end.

I first had to remove all the old insulation and then apply heat tape, which looks something like a long orange electrical cord with a plug on one end. Working on water pipes in the cold isn’t nearly as bad as trying to crawl around under the house. The underneath of my home is littered with small pieces of insulation, sharp rocks and dust about as thick as any haunted house could ever aspire to collect.

Every time I moved, a big puff of dust would rise and then hang in the air, usually somewhere around my face. Later, I would cough up mud, but that wasn’t my principal concern at this time.

As was the case the last time I crawled around under the house, I saw about 50 different species of spiders. Big spiders, little spiders, brown, black and tan. Some jumped, some crawled in webs and others just ran. There’s nothing worse than crawling face-first through a spider web in a dark and dusty crawlspace, unless of course you happen to crawl within a few feet of an unhappy rodent or snake. It was the wrong time of year for snakes and I saw no rodents, but the cat did take an interest in my shoe laces as I moved along.

Anyway, I applied the heat tapes with black electrical tape in rings about every six inches or so on the supply line under the house. Since the height of the crawl space gets less and less as you go from one end of the house to the other, it was in no way a pleasant experience. I started out crawling on my hands and knees and looking down at the pipe. After going about 10 feet, I was on one side working on the pipe. A few feet further, I was doing the military crawl on my stomach.

Somehow it always works out that I run out of tape when I get around 20 feet under the house. Either that, or I end up needing a tool or worse, I lose my knife.

I had it in my pocket, but it managed to squirm out at least three times during the course of my crawl. The batteries on my bendable flashlight were less than stellar also. Therefore, I got to spend at least a portion of my time looking for the knife and tape or just crawling back out to get something.

After working for a few hours, my arms felt like they might fall off of my body. There is no exercise quite like laying on your back or side and trying to hold your arms above the ground for several hours. The feeling reminded me of those little circles the teacher used to make me do in physical education class when I acted up — you know, the ones where you hold your arms out like an air plane and make tiny circles with your fists.

I finally got to the end of the water lines and hooked up an extension cord to the heat tapes, only to find that I had to crawl through my newly found swamp to get out on the other end of the house. I didn’t have the heart, or the arm strength, to crawl all the way back down to the other end. Since I had been running the space heater for a good while, it was very mushy, but still very cold. I’ll have to go back under and fix that leaky drain line next, but I don’t have to look forward to it.

After all that work, the water finally started going full steam ahead, only to slow down again after just a few seconds every time I turned it on. After I called and talked to the town maintenance crew, I was told to clean out my pressure-reducing valve. That may have been the trouble all along, well, after the pipes thawed, of course. I may not have needed to crawl under the house all day after all.

That sure did make me feel better about everything.

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