boring weekend

The drain in the basement floor burped up a bunch of sewer water again. Oh, yay. And here I thought my weekend was going to be boring.

I was taking some random stuff to the basement when I noticed the big, wet stain on the basement floor. I had been washing clothes. The clothes washer drains into the basement sink. Seemed like a logical assumption that the wash machine must’ve had something to do with it, but when I opened the spigots to fill the sink up, I couldn’t make the drain burp again, so I mopped up and went back to washing clothes.

When the wash machine began to empty itself at the end of the first cycle, I trotted back downstairs to see if there was still a problem. There was. And this time it was worse. A whole lot of water, blacked by something with an evil stink to it, was bubbling up from the drain. Shit. (That was an expletive, not a description of what was coming out of the drain, or that’s what I want to believe, so let’s just pretend, shall we?)

To see if I could clear it up by force-feeding it some water, I connected a black rubber balloon to the end of a hose I keep in the basement and shoved it down the drain. I do this all the time. Sometimes it works. And then there’s times like today. After running water through it for a few minutes I noticed that the basement toilet was going glubglubglub and went to check it out. The bowl was filling up with water! It was almost up to the brim!

Ran back to the sink, shut off the water. With no water pressure, the rubber balloon-thing deflated and black sewer water came gurgling up out of the drain. Shit. Again. (See above.)

I had only one more thing in my bag of tricks to try, and that was snaking out the sewer line. Last time I had to do that was about a month and half ago. Going for two months this time. Rammed that snake down the line, pulled it back up, rammed it down again, worked it in and out, rammed it down some more, worked it in and out, rammed another five feet into it, worked it, and et cetera, and so on, and such like.

And it worked. When I took a break from snaking to see how the line was draining, I found I could run the spigot wide open, pumping as much water down the drain as I wanted without getting any backup, black stinky goo or glubglubglub from the toilet. I snaked it out some more just to be sure.

Then I put everything back together, mopped the floor with a 50/50 mix of bleach and water and went upstairs to take the hottest shower I could stand. I just love weekends.