Friday, the Shiteenth

Friday, the 13th marked our sixth day of plumbing issues. No one was happy, and I was extremely... uncomfortable... as I waited for the plumbers to arrive at 9:00 a.m. I mentioned the "healthy turds," but did I mention that I'm also very "regular." That "regular" time is somewhere in the 7:00-9:00 am block of time, generally speaking, and there was nowhere to go to the bathroom without going door to door asking to use one of the neighbors' bathrooms. No, I didn't do that!
Fortunately for everyone else in my family, they all had somewhere else to go off to to take care of business.

Let me fill in some details here while we wait for these plumbers to show up, okay?
"My" plumber is a guy who owns his own company. He's mostly a one-man show in a van, though he does sometimes have a guy who works with him. When he suggested "calling in the big guns," he recommended a larger company, a company that has a lot of plumbers working for it. More equipment and all of that jazz. The guy they sent out to do the estimate on Thursday was their No. 2 guy.
Yes, seriously, that's what the woman I spoke told me when I called, "We're sending you our number two guy."
He did the estimate but, he told me while he was here, he would not be the one to come on Friday to do the repair. He was going to be unavailable. The guy who was coming out, with his assistant, was somewhere farther down the chain.

9:30 arrived but there were no plumbers.

They finally showed up at something like 9:47. No, I wasn't watching the clock!
Not exactly.

The guy comes in and looks over the situation. He wants to get under the house to look at the pipes which is a whole separate challenge, because, guess what, there's no access point to under our house from outside the house. What kind of crazy is that? The only way to get under our house is through a trap door in the closet in my daughter's room, so I had to clean out the bottom of her closet so that the guy could stick his head down there and look around for two minutes. Yeah, she wasn't happy with me for that.

The end result of all of this was to tell me that the guy who made the estimate was wrong and that the job couldn't be done except to do it this other way which... basically, he wanted to double to triple the cost of the high end of the original estimate. Which makes me wonder how much of that he gets to keep personally, because he sold it hard. But fuck that! None of what he was saying aligned with anything that "my" plumber had said and certainly didn't go along with what the No. 2 guy had said. Needless to say, I was angry.

I called the company with the intention of speaking with the owner only to find that the guy was already on the phone with the owner. So I asked the woman about what the guy was saying, about it being an impossible job, and whether it was impossible or just impossible for him. In short, was it outside of his skill set? She said, actually, it was entirely within his skill set; he just didn't want to do it. She told me that she would have the owner call me when he got off the phone the shitty plumber who was trying to scam me. But he never called...

I'm assuming that some sort of communication happened between the owner and the woman I had spoken with because, a few minutes later, shithead comes back in and tells me they'll do it for the original estimate, the high end of it, but, still.

Anyway, it was after 11:00 a.m. before any actual work started on the 9:00 a.m. appointment time after all of the shenanigans.

Which almost brings us to the end of this tale. They did get everything fixed by 5:00. -ish. Because it was actually 5:30 before the guy with the shitty attitude left because he tried to pull another set of shenanigans before leaving, but he lost that one, too, because I walked up on him on a phone call with the owner during which he was lying about things that had been said but, when he saw me, he had to quit lying and do what was agreed to.

The other thing of note has to do with what the previous occupants of our house DIYed our plumbing into. Remember how I said we had no clean out? As it turns out, we did have a clean out; it was just buried under a paving stone going into the backyard. Also, it was no good.
Look:

I'm realizing I should have labeled this drawing. heh
The vertical pipe there is the main sewer line running down to the street. The curved pipe with the arrows is the line coming out from under our house. What I want to call your attention to is the other "pipe" with the rings around it. That's not an underground pipe at all. That's the drain pipe from our roof gutter. That pipe is just inside the gate to the backyard, and, I'm assuming, that area would flood during our winter rains. I don't actually know, because the previous occupants attached a sheathe to the end of the pipe (the striped bit in the drawing) and tied it into the sewer line. Totally out of code, of course, which the plumber happily pointed out to me when they discovered what had been done.

So, see, the previous occupants dug up the sewer line, added a clean out (the circular "cap" at the top of the drawing) which only runs in the direction to the street and DUCT TAPED the gutter drain into the sewer line. I have to assume that the clean out was in case roof debris stopped up the sewer line, which has never happened to us, but I can see the danger in what they did. For us, though, the sewer line block was up under the house and the clean out we had there completely unusable. The plumbers had to take all of that out and put in a new line with a clean out that would both go under the house and down to the street. The gutter drain now drains into the yard like normal gutters do and, since it rained a few days after all of this was done, I got to experience the standing water just inside the gate. And there's no paving stone there, now, either, because that's where the new clean out is.

You know, if it's not one problem, it's some other problem, but at least we have draining water in our house again. Right?

The Toilet War

I think my toilet is out to get me. Seriously. If there are sentient toilets in the world, mine is one of them. I'm sure it has a mind of its own. If I hadn't already written a story about an insane tea kettle,

I would have to write one about the toilet. I'm not sure there's any other household... Would you call a toilet an "appliance"? I'm not thinking so, but I can't think of a better term. Anyway, I'm not sure there's anything more frightening than a toilet that's out to get you. Well, I already hate toilets, so, maybe, that's just me.

All of the things with the toilet began a year ago or so. I talked about the first time it had to be fixed here. In that post I talk about the thing that "should have been a pretty easy fix," which didn't ever get directly addressed because of the complications which occurred in trying to fix it. To put it simply, the leak, the thing that was making all the noise and keeping me up at night, was water running from the tank to the bowl because the flapper wasn't sealing adequately.

Like I said, putting in a new flapper shouldn't have been an issue, and it wasn't. Said flapper was one I put in. However, somewhere in fixing the other issues that developed, the flapper quit leaking, so it didn't get replaced.

Then, this happened. If that's not a horror story, I don't know what is. I mean, it's like that dream where you're going to class or, maybe, already in class, and you suddenly realize you're naked. Except, you know, for real.

Again, everything was fine with the toilet... Until it started talking all night again. AND KEEPING ME AWAKE! What the actual fuck?

But I got to play with food coloring in the tank trying to figure out exactly what it was that was leaking, which turned out to be the flapper. Of course. Because it makes so much sense that a piece of rubber covering a hole should be, I don't know, defective?

Look, here's the thing, flappers in toilets NEVER got replaced when I was a kid. They were these heavy pieces of rubber that I think you could have killed someone with if you'd thrown one at a person. That's not how flappers are made anymore, just so you know. Why do I know? Because I had to replace the relatively new flapper in my toilet because it was draining water like a sieve. And what I found out is that they're made to, basically, degrade, now, so that you have to replace them frequently. Seriously, you can buy multi-packs of the things (kind of like light bulbs) so that you have them on hand any time one needs replacing. Again, what the actual fuck?

So the toilet is fixed. Again. Again. But I'm sure it's out to get me. It's like hearing voices, except I'm hearing my toilet. I don't quite understand, yet, what it's saying, but it's definitely saying something. Maybe if I just move a little closer...

You know, if I don't come back, you'll know wha...

Don't Plumb Naked

[There series about my son and the school system will be back next week.]

I mentioned a while back that I had fixed a toilet. And I had. I mean, that toilet was fixed! But it didn't stay that way. Let's just say there were complications.

The problem at the time was with the hose that ran from the spigot to the toilet. It had developed a leak and, because of the way the original installer had attached it, it could not be removed from the spigot, so the whole thing had to be replaced, hose and spigot. That wouldn't have been a problem except that the plumber also attached the spigot in a way such that it couldn't be completely removed, either.

I don't want to try to explain how that worked, but let's just say that I spent hours trying to get the spigot off when I was doing all of this the first time, all to no avail. Eventually, I went to Home Depot and the plumbing woman there explained to me why it wouldn't screw off as pretty much all spigots do today. It was a little extra work, but I was able to replace the spigot and run a new hose from the spigot to the toilet. A removable hose, this time.

I am supposing due to all of the effort I put in, initially, to removing the spigot, a leak developed between the spigot and the pipe coming out of the bathroom wall (that pipe is called the "nipple," just by the way). It was just a little thing at first, and I let it have its tiny drips for a few days before I did anything about it. Look, at first, it was making a little water spot only about the size of a nickle, then, between one day and the next, there was a huge puddle. It was so large so suddenly that I thought, that first day, that my wife had just made a big puddle getting out of the shower or something. But it didn't go away.

When the puddle didn't go away, I investigated and discovered that it was the leak at the joint between the spigot and the nipple that had made the puddle. (Oh, come on. Did you think I wasn't going to say "nipple"? That's the appropriate name!) I did what any sensible person would do at that point; I got my wrench and tightened the spigot. The leak diminished to just a bit of dampness.

For about two days.

Now, here's where you have to pay attention:

It happened when I was about to get in the shower. When I say "about," I mean I was getting ready to step in, not like I say to one of my kids that I am "about" to take a shower to keep one of them from getting in before me and using all the hot water when I know good and well that "about" is at least half an hour away. No, I was "about" to step in, and I was naked. You know, as one usually is when one is about to get in the shower. That's when I saw the puddle of water on the floor behind the toilet. Again.

The words in my head were not pretty ones.

But I decided to just take care of it right then, and I went and got both wrenches because, obviously, it needed the works. It needed to have the spigot held in place while I thoroughly tightened the nut.

I was naked. Did I say that?

I got the first wrench, the one that was to go on the spigot, set to the correct size so that I could clamp it on and, just as I touched the spigot with the wrench, the spigot shot off of the nipple and water erupted into the bathroom.

Did I mention I was naked?

So here's the thing: The reason I couldn't initially remove the first spigot is that there was a ring on the end of the nipple, let's call it a nipple ring (oh, come on! you knew that was coming), that was intended to keep the nut the spigot screwed into from coming off. Evidently, all the work I had done had broken that ring causing the whole thing to shoot off of the end of the nipple, because there was no longer a nipple ring in place.

I was naked, and the cutoff valve was outside.

I did briefly consider running out to the valve in that condition. Water spewing uncontrollably into your house can have that effect on you, but I did stop for a pair of underwear (hey, I wear boxer briefs, which are almost almost like shorts), which I jerked on, before I ran out the front door. Fortunately, the valve is nearby, so I didn't have to run down to the meter at the street or anything like that, but I wasn't stopping to think about things like that at the time. I was just trying to get the water shut off before the whole bedroom was flooded along with the bathroom.

Which I did. Before the whole bedroom was flooded, at any rate. Needless to say, I spent the rest of the day reattaching the spigot and cleaning up water. The spigot was much the easier of the two jobs, and it was actually a couple of days before all the dampness was out of the carpet in the bedroom despite loads and loads of towels and a fan.

I never did get that shower.

So, yeah, here's to no more plumbing issues.

But you can be sure that I will be fully clothed before I even think about touching a... I don't think there's anything I can say there that doesn't sound dirty, so I'm just going to leave it at that.

[By the way, it's been more than a month since that happened, and there hasn't been a single drip.]