What happens when water meets drywall?

Everyone dreads finding a problem with their home. Well I found a big one this week end and it started with crawling under the house. I was supposed to crawl under the house last week end but ran out of time. So this weekend was my chance to insulate a water line for winter. during my foray into the unkown I noticed a small and slow leak in one of the lines at a T. That wasn't a big concern since I was expecting a leak or two. The next one wasn't so pleasant, forunately it was NOT grey water or a sewer line, just the hot water line for the clothes washer. It was the small puddle of water on the ground and the wet pipes that caught my attention, of course watching for a minute it became very obvious that it was an active leak and upon further inspection gave me a clue as to where it was coming from. The insulation was saturated with water in an area directly surrounding the pipes for the washer. That was a worrisome moment and after finishing the juob I had set out to do I quickly got out and called the Father In Law. Terry gave me the advice of cutting out around the water faucets to find the leak, as he was giving it I saw the leaking culprit as obvious as pink hair on a punk. It was coming directly from the mouth of the water hook up. Well knowing that Terry gave me a few options to try, one of them being to cut out a six inch area around the valve, so saying good bye I set out to work and quickly found out that the water had soaked the dry wall in over half of the lower wall, leading to an even bigger mess so to keep it clean I removed all the dry wall. I noticed though that this was not the first time that this has been a problem, there were water marks that gave evidence of previous soakings. Here are the pictures of our little misadventure. On a funny note Randy had mentioned the movie "the money pit" just before we bought the house and recommended that we watch it.

What a mess!
I started cutting at the stud on the left and found soggy drywall and continued around until I had removed most of it, at that point I figured it would be easier to replace the whole bottom portion of the wall.

To stop the leak from causing more damage I cut the end off the hose and rerouted the drip in a safe direction so that an emergency run to the local plumbing store could be avoided until a slightly later date.

I knew that there would be issues with the home when we bought it, so far the problems have been relatively simple. The glories of home ownership!