I will give you some illumination as to why this past Monday is just your typical Monday for us. Things start piling up from the weekend, for example, like sleep debt and dishes. This weekend was rather extraordinary in the dishes department, however. On Saturday night our kitchen sink slowed to a trickle. Not the faucet, mind you. It was the drain. We figured it must be some excess drywall dust and paint from the renovations, so we picked up some No Name Drain Opener and poured it down to de-clog the pipes. We let it sit in there overnight.
Sunday morning rolled around and we went to inspect the flow issues we'd had the previous day and expected to see an empty sink. Well, it was now plugged solid. I thought that stuff like that was supposed to unplug slow drains, not plug them even worse! We had already invited company over for lunch, so Faith got the roast and Yorkshire puddings ready and left the dishes on the counter until after church. During Sunday School (AKA Family Bible Hour at the church we attend currently) I (Mark) went and picked up two bottles of the strongest stuff you're allowed to use in your pipes, Drano Max Gel, and went to church.
We poured one bottle down the drain when we got home. We waited. No result. The company came, we ate, visited, relaxed, and waited. When they left at 4:00 PM I poured the second bottle into the standing water. No luck. We were getting frustrated, and so we left it to sit overnight again. Please imagine the stack of dishes awaiting us in the morning...
Monday morning started at 5:00 AM with Aslynn waking me up because she had to go to the bathroom. I helped her and threw a few blankets on her bed because she was cold, and I felt the chill myself so I checked the thermostat - which directed me to the pilot light that was out and refused to re-light for the fourth time in a year. I went back to bed. I awoke to the alarm, showered, got dressed, and went to get Micah out of bed for school who was grumpy because I woke him up.
I picked up Judah who was very pleased to see me and prepared a bottle for him. While I held him, my arm and stomach began to feel very wet. He had explosive diarrhea and was sharing it with me. I was not impressed. I changed him, sent him to Faith with his bottle, got myself washed and dressed again, and went to drag Micah the sleep-beast from his cave. After enduring attitude all morning long, I turned my attention to the sink full of water which appeared to have gone down overnight. Before celebrating and singing the praises of Drano, I poured water down the sink just to be sure. Sure enough, it backed right up into the sink again. I was not impressed with Super-Duper Drano.
At this point you may be thinking about calling a plumber. After all, the sink AND furnace are both screwed up, so why not? Well, in my mind was the last bill for over $200 from a plumber who repaired the furnace less than a month ago, and I thought we can live without a furnace for the summer. That and I was just recently poo-covered anyway from Judah, so what more could happen?
I went to the school maintenance shop in town and told them my dilemma. I got a few good suggestions regarding the furnace, all of which cost money, and then came back when I remembered I hadn't asked about the sink. They sent me home with a snake for the line. This is where things get messy.
I tried and tried and tried and tried, but it would not come loose! I shoved the snake in through the actual drain hole and could not get past the P-trap. (For those of you who are plumbing illiterate, it's not what you think - it's the little U-shaped dip underneath your sink that fills with water and keeps the sewage smell from coming back into the house). I removed the snake and decided to go primal.
I grabbed the hacksaw, chopped off the line after all of the joints, and drained whatever was in the line into a bucket, Drano and all. I then dismantled the sink, removed the P-trap and multiple 90 degree elbows that would make any sane plumber cringe, and snaked the line twenty feet. When I could go no further, I jammed and jammed until I decided I was at some other corner quite some distance down the line. I removed the snake with little reminder that it was down there. In the P-trap I hacked off I found an old rusty dental tool that helped the 4-90 degree angles impede the snake's progress.
In the mean time, Faith did the laundry from last week and proceeded to wash all of our dishes in the bathtub. The bathtub wasn't draining properly either, so I snaked it too. I yanked out a hairball the size of my fist in the end. It was otherwise good, the dishes were clean, and there was no signs of blockage on that end of the world. Thank the Lord!
Then I went into Moose Jaw with 3 children and dropped Faith off at work, picked up the parts I needed, and watched as Aslynn decided to scratch her head with her cheeseburger and told me multiple times she had to go to the bathroom at the multiple hardware stores I visited to find the complete set of parts I needed. I even locked the kids in the van at one store, but Micah came running in anyways because Judah had ripped his lion mask he had made the day before and somehow set off the panic button making my van honk continuously with three frantically panicked children inside! You know how you never think it could be your vehicle making that infernal racket? That was me. But we survived. And I got all of the right parts. We even dropped a Big Mac off for Faith at work and came home.
I reassembled and glued my properly fitted and directed line back on the sink after I put the kids to bed and I cleaned up the plastic shavings under the sink. I thought I was so smart. The drain pipe had no extra 90's AND a clean-out for the P-trap. So I ran the water down the drain (Faith was home again by this time). To our horror, the drain in the sink made this noise like we were filling up a water pitcher, and after 30 seconds the water backed up right into the sink once more. I was mortified. That was Monday. Just your typical Monday, right?
Monday stretched into Tuesday. When the guys at the maintenance shop heard the work I had done and my knowledge of the situation, they sent me home with an electric, motorized roto-snake. I took off the clean-out on the P-trap, drained the water, and proceeded to send the snake as far as I thought I should go. When I retracted it, it had gone through over 30 feet of pipe before it quit retracting. Did I mention that it quit? Got jammed? Wouldn't move? I tried moving it back and forth a few times, and discovered that it wasn't stuck in the drain. Oh no, it was much worse than that. With only 3 feet remaining the dumb thing got itself twisted up inside and sheared off the end. Lovely. Try explaining that to maintenance! They were pretty good about the whole thing.
I was at the end of my snake - uh, rope. Enough of this crap. I decided to take the life of my trailer into my apparently incapable hands and do the unthinkable. I took off the panel on my bathroom wall located in our addition directly behind the kitchen sink to find where the vent line was for the toilet. I measured twice, and then took my jigsaw to the cabinet in the kitchen, tearing out wall panels, insulation, metal siding, and more insulation until at last I found the line. Again I dropped Faith off at work who had prepped most of our supper for me to finish, drove into Moose Jaw with three kids, got parts, endured trips to the toilet, got bread and cookies at Superstore, and came home.
I made supper, fed and washed up the kids, and went right back to work. I was able to salvage most of my hard work that I hacked apart to join the sink to the bathroom line. I then removed the four feet or more of pipe that stretched out through the kitchen cabinets and sealed the old line off. And then I prayed...
I should have prayed more at the beginning. Perhaps that would have done it. But the Spirit within me was speaking in groanings too deep for words. The groanings I was having should never be translated into words. Anyway, by the time I was done, I ran water down the line to fill the trap and make sure I had done the right thing. No leaks, no back-ups, no smells, no problems. I then made extra sure by flushing the toilet and running water through the two sinks simultaneously seeing if there would be any back-ups or smells. And then I smelled it - OH NO!
You can smell anything you want to if you really try hard enough. But I wasn't imagining things. Something reeked. I took the dirty diapers out of the trash in the bathroom and sniffed the air again. It stank like rotting something. Micah then comes running to me saying, "Daddy, something smells like puke!" That's it!
"You're right Micah!" I wanted to cry. Then I realized that the smell did not originate in the kitchen. It reeked in the entryway and by the living room though. I checked the bathroom again, but this was not the source of the stench.
"Where's Judah?" I asked the two older children. "I don't know," said Micah, "I think he was playing on the princess table." Well, he wasn't in the living room anymore on the princess table, that much I could see. No, I followed my nose to the playroom where barf-boy was covered from head to toe playing King Kong in Aslynn's play castle. I threw him in the tub and went looking for the original crime scene. Aslynn's princess table was covered in what appeared to be cottage cheese smeared around by a little boy's body. I cleaned him up, cleaned up the vomit, gave the other two kids baths, sent them to bed, and sniffed the fresh, clean air. I cleaned up my construction mess for the second time and threw in a bunch of dishes to wash. I was so happy.
Now one side of the sink decided to spring a slow leak around the weld by the drain from so much fooling around. I hate my trailer. But the drain works again. That's more than I can say for the furnace.
- Mark
1 comment:
Oh, Mark ...
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