akbar

Ah, adventures in plumbing! How I’ve missed them. Just the other day My Darling B was remarking on how long it’s been since we’ve had a plumbing emergency, and then she rapped the table with her knuckles, as if that was going to bust up the bad juju she had unleashed with just a few words.

The basement sink has dependably been the messiest, most repetitive plumbing adventure in the house. It stops draining every three or four months, and to fix it I have to take apart the trap, that little dip in the pipe under the drain. Since there’s always water in the sink, I end up dumping it onto the basement floor. Weirdly, there’s a drain in the floor just three feet away that all the water runs into and is never plugged. I don’t understand that at all. The drain in the floor and the drain from the sink must both end up in the same sewer line, so how can one be plugged and the other not? Whatever.

is the worst for plumbing emergencies, so of course that turned out to be the problem I’d have to fix. The drain gets stopped up from time to time and I have to fix it by shoving a hose down the drain and forcing water through it to move the block. What makes it such a pain in the ass to fix is that two sinks drain into the sewer from there, the one in the basement and the one in the kitchen. If I forced water down only the drain of the basement sink, it would just back up and come out the kitchen sink, so I have to stick a hose down that, too, which means I have to crawl under the kitchen sink and take apart the trap