OT: broken hot H2O line under house, I R a plumber now I guess Options

[Sammy]

I noticed a couple of strange things yesterday, my hot water heater wasn't keeping up as well as it used to, and the flower bed in front of the house is flooded.
Duh, I finally put them together today, I have a broken hot water line under the slab.

It looked comical, my whole family walking around on the tile floor barefooted trying to find the warmest spot.
i have it nailed down to a 6 square foot area, I'm going to shoot it with an infra-red heat gun tomorrow to nail it down better before I start ripping up 5 year old (expensive) ceramic tile that i may or may not be able to match. I have a few squares left over from when I installed it, hopefully that will be enough.

Luckily it looks like it's in the middle of an open area and not under a cabinet or something. I figure with a little luck and an electric jack hammer I can find and fix the leak. I'm waaaay too much of a CSOB to hire a real plumber, prolly cost me more in the long run but that's who I am.

Any BTDT stories or advice before I rip into it?
Tanks.

[Sammy]

It is the hot water line from the heater. My guess is that it goes under the slab towards the kitchen sink and branches off and goes to the bathrooms near where the leak is. I found 8 spare tiles I saved (12x12) whjen I installed the tile originally so that takes care of one headache.
I can have the tiles busted out and a hole in the slab in less than 2 hours and all that will cost is $75 for the rental of the jackhammer.
If I find the leak it's all gravy. I assess the condition of the pipe and make a determination.
Then fix the bad section, wrap with underground pipe tape (I can get that at work) compact is some fill, then pour concrete to repair the slab.
I figure all that will take less than 8 hours to do, again assuming I nail the leak.
Several days later I mortor down the replacement tiles, then grout the next day.
Did I mention that along with being a CSOB I'm as stubborn as a mule?

The upside is, the wife said that if I fix this myself without paying a whole bunch of money to contractors I can keep my next $2500 sign-on bonus (from this crappy job I gots, they promised $2500 after 3 months and another $2500 after 9 months) and spend in on Porsche stuff. Talk about motivation.

The bonus was to try and keep me here. I am the sixth person to have this position in 8 years, the other guys get burned out after about a year and bailed. Just like I'm planning to do (IMG:http://www.914world.com/bbs2/html/emoticons/wink.gif)
It doesn't hurt that I already found a better job that pays,.... well we'll just say the salary is one figure more than I'm getting now. (IMG:http://www.914world.com/bbs2/html/emoticons/aktion035.gif)