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I guess this 1/11/11 crap counts as a holiday. That's when things typically break around here, and today was no exception. (Turns out, as I went looking through past entries to see if I'd ever titled one "Plumb Loco"- and I had- one of my many posts about running to Ed Youngs Hardware was dated 1/11 of last year.)
It was an innocent enough request from the missus: Can you do something about the bathroom sink drain? It's running real slow. Now usually, I take such requests with numerous grains of salt water; the first sentence in my home plumbing manual is "Call me Ishmael"- but this drain gets probably the least use of any of the sinks/similars in the house, and I've even replaced the trap when needed.
As, of course, it was.
----
Plunging was the first try, but that got only a small amount of the problem solved, so I went downstairs for the snake. It hit what felt like paydirt, and I gleefully ran the water "all clear" and crowed about my accomplishment- until the water started pouring out from the under-sink vanity. Sure enough, the snake had poisoned the bottom of the trap, and the resulting hole (an accident waiting to happen, given how hard our water is here) required me to go get a new one.
That would not be the problem. Getting the bonded-on nuts off of the trap was. Almost instantly, Eleanor got called into work and needed to work around me to get ready for work, and words were spoken. Not especially nice ones on my part. Ultimately, though, I got the whole trap off from the non-nutty far end, and took it to my Saviors across the car park from our church. They sold me a somewhat brassier piece that might last five years instead of the roughly two we get out of these things, and with the house to myself for the afternoon, I cleaned the mess, cleared the space, and got it on....
and leaking again.
Something did not compute. One of the nuts did not seem to have a washer that fit the assembly. So back I went, now with the snow finally beginning to fall (we're getting 3-6 inches by tomorrow night, bitches!), I waited for Not Joe the Plumber to inspect my assembly, and we determined that the instruction-less new trap was lacking a 69-cent washer to match the tubing coming from the sink proper. That in hand, the whole actual repair then lasted five minutes.
It was an innocent enough request from the missus: Can you do something about the bathroom sink drain? It's running real slow. Now usually, I take such requests with numerous grains of salt water; the first sentence in my home plumbing manual is "Call me Ishmael"- but this drain gets probably the least use of any of the sinks/similars in the house, and I've even replaced the trap when needed.
As, of course, it was.
----
Plunging was the first try, but that got only a small amount of the problem solved, so I went downstairs for the snake. It hit what felt like paydirt, and I gleefully ran the water "all clear" and crowed about my accomplishment- until the water started pouring out from the under-sink vanity. Sure enough, the snake had poisoned the bottom of the trap, and the resulting hole (an accident waiting to happen, given how hard our water is here) required me to go get a new one.
That would not be the problem. Getting the bonded-on nuts off of the trap was. Almost instantly, Eleanor got called into work and needed to work around me to get ready for work, and words were spoken. Not especially nice ones on my part. Ultimately, though, I got the whole trap off from the non-nutty far end, and took it to my Saviors across the car park from our church. They sold me a somewhat brassier piece that might last five years instead of the roughly two we get out of these things, and with the house to myself for the afternoon, I cleaned the mess, cleared the space, and got it on....
and leaking again.
Something did not compute. One of the nuts did not seem to have a washer that fit the assembly. So back I went, now with the snow finally beginning to fall (we're getting 3-6 inches by tomorrow night, bitches!), I waited for Not Joe the Plumber to inspect my assembly, and we determined that the instruction-less new trap was lacking a 69-cent washer to match the tubing coming from the sink proper. That in hand, the whole actual repair then lasted five minutes.