The Saga of Our Sink

When I was in my last trimester with Ryder, our kitchen sink suddenly clogged up. We called a friend of ours, Scott, who is a plumber, and he came and fixed it. We will be forever grateful.

10 months later, it did it again. This time I wasn't pregnant, at least. But it was right after my mother-in-law had (very generously) cooked dinner for us in our home. She had offered to clean everything up, too, but I felt like that would put me over the top in the laziness department, so I insisted that I would clean everything once they'd left, which ended up being around 8:00pm. I started in on the dishes, and within five minutes it became clear that our sink was not draining.

Craig took apart the trap. He ran out to Lowe's, and discovered that they closed at 8:00. And then we called Scott again. He gave Craig some tips, and Craig resolved to try and fix it the next day after work. Meanwhile, I had a kitchen absolutely FULL of dirty dishes, which were beginning to smell. And paper plates to live off in the meantime. Naturally, the next day Craig decided to work an hour later than he needed to (I'm still seething about that one). And by the time he'd tried out every trick he knew, it was (once again) eight o'clock and we still didn't have a working sink.

So Scott came over.

He used a huge motorized plumbing snake (any of those terms might be wrong-- you can talk to a plumber if you want the technical details!) and shoved it approximately 35 feet into our pipes before finding the clog. At which point he determined that he couldn't seem to make it go away. He had one last option-- a snake with what is essentially a drill on the end (he called it a "pig tail"). But he said if that didn't work, it probably meant that the underground pipes in our front yard had shifted from the earthquake and we'd need a better (and paid!) plumber to take care of it.

I cannot even begin to imagine how much that would cost.

But Scott tried the pig tail before completely giving up. And I whispered prayers in my head the whole time he did it. And he thought he got through. So he pulled the entire thing back out and examined the end of it to figure out what had caused the clog. This is the most disgusting thing ever: there was hair on the end of it. As far as we can tell, our shower drains do not connect to the kitchen sink drain in any way, and since I don't make it a habit of putting my hair down the kitchen sink, the conclusion was that probably a rat had gotten stuck in the pipes, trying to climb up from the city sewers.

Ew ew ew ew EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEW!!!!!!

I'm so grossed out by that. Anyway, with the clog hopefully removed, the next step was to test it. We plugged the sink, filled it with water, and then watched it drain. It began spiraling down like water should do. We got our hopes up. There was one little blip of water that splashed back up, but Scott said that could just be the clog flushing out more. Just to be safe, we decided to test it again. Again we plugged the sink, filled it, and watched it drain. This time it drained half way. And stopped.

And I nearly cried.

Scott decided to go look at the pipes in the crawl space. We heard him banging around below us, and suddenly he let out a wonderfully triumphant yelp, right as the water suddenly drained away. Apparently, when snakes, plungers, and a host of other gadgets don't completely do the trick, you might want to just try hitting the pipes to make the clog loosen up! Who knew?

Anyway, we have a working kitchen sink again. And I did all those dishes today (only 48 hours after they'd been used-- so gross!). And I'm feeling very thankful for friends who are so kind to us.

If it clogs up again, we may just have to give Scott our next child or something. Or something worth more...





Watch out for rats, huh?