Our run of warmer than usual winter weather has finally caught up with us in a hurry, as we're in single-digit temps at the moment and won't be getting out of the low teens today. I was considering the cold commute this morning when I went to turn on the shower and was met with something unexpected: an almost total lack of water.

As you can imagine, this got my attention pretty quickly. The cold water tap on the sink was putting out the barest of trickles, and the toilet tank did not seem to be refilling after a test flush.

After 37 years, I was facing my first frozen pipe.

Once I'd gotten the full scope of the problem in the bathroom, I went downstairs to the kitchen and found that we were getting plenty of cold water there, which was something.

I then trooped down to the basement, fearing that I'd see evidence not of a frozen pipe but a burst pipe. Thankfully, there were no indoor waterfalls in the basement, so I went to work confirming what I'd figured before: our cold water pipe runs along the front of the house before turning to go upstairs at the front left corner of the house. A corner which might as well be exposed to the elements, given how cold and breezy it was over there.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not the handiest guy around, so I hadn't really worked up a plan of action to this point other than getting our space heater and setting it to work in that corner of the basement. But what I lack in handiness I more than make up for in research skills, so I located the homeowner's guide book from Home Depot that the fabulous DeVeaus gave us for Christmas and looked up frozen pipes. Turns out the book had several excellent solutions for preventing frozen pipes, but was suprisingly quiet on unfreezing pipes.

But the Internet was more than willing to offer advice, giving me a couple of ideas that I put into motion. The first was to keep one of the upstairs taps open, which I think the wife had already done (she being from Maine, where this does happen on occasion). The other was to take a hair dryer to the pipe, though that seemed to be geared more for attacking the actual section of pipe with the frozen area.

I had no idea where that was (and it could very well be several feet up the wall), so I tried something related to that trickle of water. I kept the hair dryer at one point on the pipe, hoping that it would warm the water enough so that it'd speed thawing once it reached the frozen area.

After a few minutes of using the hair dryer (and moving it to a point farther along the pipe), I was rewarded with a banging sound and the audible flow of water as things started moving again. I hung out for a couple of minutes to see if this would lead to any leaking, but as things stayed dry I figured the worst had passed.

We've kept the cold water tap on the sink open a little, hopefully enough to keep the water moving so it won't freeze. Keep your fingers crossed.