I was raking cat turds out of one of the three litter boxes in the basement when My Darling B called down the stairs to me, “Would you come up and look at the shower?”  That’s not the kind of question she asks unless she’s hollaring it, but I didn’t notice the slightest hint of panic in her voice. Her tone was more like, “Well, lookee here…,” so I didn’t immediately dash up the stairs, but I was a tad worried as I made my way to the bathroom.

When I got there, B was in her bathrobe just inside the door, waiting for me, and in her hand she held the handle that turned the shower on and off. It’s made to come off, but not without unscrewing a tiny screw in the middle of it, and anyway it didn’t come off the way it was supposed to.  It came off because B somehow torqued it hard enough to break off the brass stump that sticks out from the valve, and because she broke off the stump, there was nothing to grab hold of to close the valve. The shower was running wide-open, all hot water. I had to shut off the water to the house.  It was either that, or leave the hot water running full-blast until the plumber showed up.

Lucky for us, the plumber could pull the broken valve out and slip a new one in without too much fuss, and he didn’t even charge us too much, for a plumber.  I was expecting he’d have to tear out the wall, saw the pipes off to remove the valve, sweat new pipes on and add a new valve, and I would have been happy to pay him for that because I’ve done that before, when I was crazy enough to want to do it instead of calling a plumber.  Now that I know I never want to do that again, I don’t have any trouble handing many, many dollars over to a professional.

I dropped something down the drain of the bathroom sink yesterday, so I had to take the trap off the drain to get it out and when I did, the pipe broke, spewing grease and hair and greyish chunks of minerals from the hard water  all over my hands and arms.  I’ve never had a drain pipe vomit on me quite so disgustingly before.  Not only did it puke sewage all over me, there was a great, big greasy hairball dangling from the tail pipe that I had to dig out with my fingers.  There isn’t enough money in the world to make me want to be a plumber.

The only thing to do at that point was take it all apart and figure out what had to be replaced, and that’s when I found out I couldn’t get a wrench around the nut that held the trap on the tail pipe.  It’s one of those bathroom sinks that sits on a pedestal.  The tail pipe – the pipe that runs straight down from the drain hole in the bottom of the sink – is surrounded on three sides by the pedestal, a column of porcelain with a narrow opening up the back.  I couldn’t even see the tail pipe.  I could get one hand on the pipe, but I couldn’t get a wrench in there, and I tried two kinds of channel locks and three kinds of monkey wrenches.  I have a lot of wrenches.  There’s no way a plumber put that trap in without a couple of mirrors and a special wrench made for just this purpose that probably costs a couple hundred dollars.

The good news is, I only had to make one trip to the store to buy a new trap and whatever the pipe that connects the trap to the wall is called.  These adventures in plumbing almost always require at least two trips to the store after I get home and discover I guessed wrong on the size of the pipe or bought the nut but forgot to get the bolt, something like that.  I felt pretty good about getting it right on the first try.

Cleaning all the spew off the wall and the floor was not fun.  On the other hand, standing under a hot shower for an indecently long time felt great.

I have a funny story, sort of.

I was eating breakfast day before yesterday. Sitting alone at the table, I heard My Darling B rouse herself from bed and make her way to the bathroom. I usually wake up long before she does, partly because it’s my nature, and partly because that way I can take a shower and be done in the bathroom before she gets up. I like to have the solitary quiet of the house to myself for a little while, too.

B was in the bathroom for only a couple minutes before I heard her muttering to herself, “Where is it? Dammit! Where is it?” Then she came out of the bathroom and started searching through the hall closet. “Where is it? Dammit!” I waited, probably a little too long, to decide whether she was angry or desperate. The tone in her voice might have gone either way, and I didn’t want to rush to help while she was angry. There are times when people just want to cuss at something stupid. I certainly don’t expect people to come rushing in every time I start cussing. Sometimes, I just want to vent.

But it quickly became apparent that B wasn’t just venting, she was distraught. It took a little too long for me to twig to that. And then I heard the sound of water spilling.

I shot out of my seat and trotted across the living room to the hall as quickly as I could get around all the furniture in my way. B was in the bathroom again, dancing through a spreading pool of water as she threw every towel in arm’s reach on the floor. The toilet was overflowing, and for whatever reason the water would not stop running.

“Where’s the plunger?” B cried desperately. “I can’t find it!”

I should have pushed her out of the way and shut the water off at that point, but I wasn’t thinking entirely rationally, just reacting. I bolted from the room and ran downstairs where I knew I could find another plunger, grabbed it, and ran back upstairs with it. B was still standing over the toilet helplessly. I handed her the plunger; she gave the toilet a single plunge that unblocked it, and the water stopped flowing over the lip of the bowl onto the floor.

After that it was just a matter of sopping up the water off the bathroom floor, or so I thought. I gathered up the sodden towels, throwing them into the tub one by one, then wringing as much of the water out of the last one as possible before throwing it back into the puddle on the floor. On my hands and knees, I mopped up the water around the toilet when my eyes fell on the heating grate in the wall.

The bathroom was updated just before we moved in. It was either a do-it-yourself job by the owner, or it was done by a low-bid handyman. Cheap wainscoting wrapped around two walls, covered in a single coat of thin white paint. The heating grate had once been a more durable fixture, replaced by a diffuser made of stamped metal that they’d never fixed to the floor or wall. It rattled when the heat came on, and when I bumped it while cleaning, it skittered away from the hole left in the wall. The ductwork inside the hole ended in a jagged stump, and I could see into the basement through the hole.

I paused with the sopping wet towel in my hands and looked down into the hole. “I wonder how much water ran down there?” I said aloud. It was a rhetorical question, but B was standing just behind me, looking over my shoulder. “Probably a lot,” she said.

I knew just the spot in the basement where the water would have fallen: The hole was in a corner between two bookshelves that were stacked full of our most prized books. Luckily, most of the water ran down the wall to pool on the floor, where a cheap rug from Shopko was soaking most of it up.

But then I noticed a slow drip from a tiny hole I’d made to screw a lamp into the finished ceiling. A very slow drip, but still significant. The hole was about three feet from the wall. If the water made it as far as that hole, there might be more water up there. I found a hand drill on my hobby bench, just an arm’s length away, fitted it with a bit and drilled an experimental hole. Water ran steadily from the hole when I pulled the drill bit out. Not good. I drilled another hole about an inch to one side. More steadily running water. I put a bucket under the streaming water, then went to find a bigger drill bit.

Using a quarter-inch bit, I enlarged the first two holes. Water streamed as steadily from them as it would from an open faucet. I drilled a third hole another inch away but no more. The streams were as wide apart as the bucket would catch. When the stream slowed to a drip, there was about a gallon of water in the bucket.

And thus ended our most recent plumbing adventure, which has morphed into a post-disaster cleanup. I have to get my head up above the finished ceiling to see how much damage was done, for instance, and if I find that it’s all ruined, I’ll have to tear it out before it gets moldy. Then I’ll have to fix that heating grate so it won’t be an open drain to the basement. The fun starts today! And how’s your weekend?

I spent the better part of Saturday afternoon exploring the depths of our sewer system with a steel snake, and I think I can say that I’ve had better days.

Our sewer gets clogged up with lint and whatever else comes out of the wash machine so often that I’ve rigged a cap on top of the sewer stack that I can easily pop off whenever I notice that water is slow to drain out of the basement sink where the wash water collects. I’m not sure why it gets clogged as often as it does. I imagine some day I’ll find out. It’ll probably be the same day we have to hand a couple thousand dollars over to a plumbing contractor.

But in the meantime, I’ve been able to bust the clog pretty reliably with a sewer snake, a fifty-foot-long stainless steel hand tool powered only by gritty determination and lubricated with plenty of good old elbow grease. Like many a classic hand tool, I bust a sweat inside of ten minutes using it, so it’s not only a tool to fix things, it’s a way to keep in shape. Trying to look at the silver lining here.

The snake slides directly down the stack and into the sewer. The first ten or twelve feet slide in easily enough until they meet a bend in the pipe. Then I have to start playing a game of tamping it down until it meets resistance, tugging it back a couple inches and tamping it down again until I finally manage to sneak the head of the snake around the corner. Once I get it past that first corner it’s fairly easy to get moving again, although that corner does make it noticeably harder.

About twenty or twenty-five feet in, the head butts up against something. I’m not exactly sure what, but I’ve got an idea that it’s the joint where the basement toilet or the floor drain, maybe both, meets the main sewer line, and it’s a bitch to get past. The head doesn’t seem to want to go on from here. I don’t know if it’s trying to go up one of the branch lines or what, but it sometimes takes me as much as an hour of shoving, tugging and cursing to get the snake past that point. This is one of the few home improvement projects that doesn’t benefit from a lot of loud and repeated cussing. I do it anyway.

When the snake finally gets moving again, it’s only because I keep at it forever and ever and ever. Suddenly it just pops free of whatever obstacle is down there and moves on. And holy shit, what a relief that is. Especially when I’ve been at it for any more than twenty minutes and/or I’ve worked my blood pressure up to head asploding levels.

I don’t have to go much further from that second obstacle to bust whatever’s clogging the pipe. Just another foot or two and the standing water in the floor drain starts to drop. Unfortunately, after the snake gets past that joint or turn or whatever it is, getting the rest of it down there becomes a game of inches. Half the snake is writhing around down there in the godawful muck of the sewer, bent around at least one corner, maybe two. We’re talking major friction.

When I tamp it down, I have to make sure it’s perfectly straight. If it’s even slightly out of line, it goes sproing (not getting too technical for you, am I?) and twists around the inside of the pipe like a classroom model of DNA. I can tamp it down three or four times before my concentration wanders and the snake goes sproing. Much cussing follows, but only the first hundred times it goes sproing. I’m pretty tired by the hundredth time and change strategy to trying to save my breath when the cussing dwindles until the only sounds I can make are inarticulate grunts.

I’ve toyed with the idea of buying a motorized snake, because power tools are hella awesome and this particular one might possibly save me a lot of time and aching muscles. The ones I’ve seen in the store, though, look a lot like cheap knockoffs of the heavy-duty version that a professional would bring to the job. I figure I could get maybe one or two uses before a crucial but irreplaceable plastic part would break, so I’m not gonna go there. If it ever comes to the point that I can’t bust a clog manually, that’s when I’ll call the professionals to come in with the big artillery for a full-out assault.