Plumbing Saga: Part the First, Enter the Plumbers

When people gush about the joys of home ownership the first exclamation is usually: “Owning a home is great! You can do whatever you want because you’re the landlord!”

There is a manic gleam in their eye and their arms are thrown wide as if to give you a reassuring hug welcoming you to the society of those who own. What they really mean is:  “Owning a home is great! You can let whatever you want go to seed for as long as you want because you’re the slumlord!” That hug is a really a death grip.

In a way that is how David views home ownership. Every suspicious noise or piece of rotted garage siding that falls off during a wet and windy weekend is met with bemusement and nonchalance. Since every reaction has an equal or opposite reaction- I have a panic attack.

The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgarage Door 

That is part of the reason we are facing a major plumbing job with winter bearing down on us.  The other part is: stuff breaks when you use it and you can't not use the plumbing.

Obligatory

Our home has two and a half baths. In one bathroom the bathtub drains slow and in another bathroom the sink drains slow. Before we moved in (three years ago) we had one toilet replaced with some crazy POWER FLUSH because it needed a “double flush.”

Hindsight being 20/20 and all that, these are probably all indications of a bigger problem  but we were young and stupid so we moved in and proceeded to do nothing about anything.

The slow bathtub finally got on David’s last nerve and he called a plumber to snake it. They came, they snaked, they left. Only to be called back about a week later because sludge water came up the bathtub drain.

Now let’s all stop, hold hands, and sing together to the tune of Do Your Ears Hang Low?: "Do your drains drain slow? Or do they tend to overflow? Can they drain without you plunging? No? Well then, they’re probably low slope!”

The plumbers were puzzled (by the slow drains not the singing) and they suggested exploratory plumbing: a jet and camera. They came back to do that and couldn’t get the camera past a certain point in the pipes.

The next step in this incredibly fascinating process is excavation! Which is the fancy word for “dig up a part of the front yard where their beeping detector tool thing says the problem should be.” So what is the problem? Who knows! It could be a tree root or grease and God-knows-what-else blocking the pipe.

If the problem isn’t there then they will dig further out in the yard. And if the problem isn’t there? I have no idea. I’m going to buy a bottle of champagne next week in good faith that the problem will be solved in one excavation and we can celebrate a job well done by other people.