We had break­fast at Fatz. The restau­rant itself doesn’t do break­fast, but they do allow wor­thy causes to use the build­ing, with their guid­ance, to raise money by hold­ing pan­cake break­fasts. A coworker’s church was rais­ing fund’s for mis­sion­ary work, so we bought a cou­ple tickets.

After­wards we did our weekly gro­cery shop­ping. As Donna put away our pur­chases, I went to start paint­ing the com­puter room, but I didn’t have a paint tray… I had tossed it out after the gray wall paint because I was going to buy a new larger one to match the larger lin­ers I had acci­den­tally bought and never did. Donna said while you are out, you might as well get some milk too because we for­got to get that on this morning’s shopping.

When I got home she greeted me at the door and said, “The kitchen sink isn’t drain­ing.” We spent the next 15 min­utes look­ing for the plunger we just knew we had. After check­ing every­place we could think of, I was prepar­ing to go to the store for the third time this morn­ing, when Donna found it in an unex­pected place in the garage.

After five min­utes of upper body work­out with the plunger with no suc­cess I got a bucket and loos­ened the waste line from the garbage dis­posal. It, along with the trap, were full of water, but no clog. I tried using my lit­tle barbed snake thing, but it only went in the line into the wall a lit­tle way before run­ning into the 90 degree bend and stop­ping inef­fec­tively. I then knew I was going to the store for the third time. Needed some Liq­uid Plumr. Put the waste line back together and grabbed the car keys.

I poured half a bot­tle of pun­gent vis­cous goo down the drain. Waited 15 min­utes and the water level hadn’t moved down. So the other half of the bot­tle went in and another 15 min­utes later, same results. Time to call in the other kind of liq­uid plumber (the human body being approx­i­mately 70% water.)

We first called our usual plumber and their on the phone esti­mate scared us off. Plumber #2 was an answer­ing machine and plumber #3 spent 3 min­utes explain­ing to me how expen­sive it would be for him to come out on a week­end. We bit the bul­let, called plumber #1 and said come on out.

He spent the first hour on the roof run­ning his mini-snake down the kitchen vent to no avail. Then he crawled under the house to see if there was a solu­tion down there. And when I say crawl, I mean crawl. When you first go under our house there is about 4 feet of room from the dirt to the floor joists, but it shrinks quickly. By the time you get to the kitchen is is about a foot and a half and there is all that HVAC dust work to squeeze over or under to get there. The only option left was dig­ging a hole. The kitchen drain is a sep­a­rate line that goes out from the house and then it drops down and joins the main line, this is here the prob­lem was. After 55 years this junc­tion had become totally plugged. I guess because of the dis­tance from the sink and the size of the pipe it could hold quite a bit of water so that we didn’t notice that gunk was build­ing up and nar­row­ing the opening.

It did cost us a chunk of change to have him come out, but we got our money’s worth. He spent almost 4 solid hours work­ing on this fix and it was rain­ing on him the whole time.