organized chaos

Since the neighbor is over working on our clogged kitchen sink, I thought I would rerun an old post in the same vein from back in the day.

previously posted March 23, 2006

Good Morning, Citizens of the World.

You know, there’s nothing like starting out your day with a cup of coffee in one hand and a toilet plunger in the other. We’re talking invigorating energy here.

I’ve been at war with our bathtub going on months now. I thought the slow drain was a result of all my hair falling out and I imagined the narrow old drain just couldn’t take the consequences of my stress. So I got a nifty hair catcher that just plops right into your drain for a buck-fifty.

The next time I was in the shower, I popped that bad-boy right into the drain to catch my stress and turned the water on. In just a few minutes time the water level started to rise, and lifted the nifty hair catcher with it. No suction. Drats!

So my daily shower ritual began.

#1 Run the water to clean out previous hair and dirt left from the previous shower

#2 Run enough water to plunge, in hopes of opening the drain

#3 Plop in stress, errr, I mean hair catcher

#4 Start shower and get in

#5 Watch drain suspiciously for signs of suction

#6 No dice for the suction quotient

#7 Reach out for the plunger, placed conveniently by the bathtub

#8 Plunge the drain, with the shower still running mind you, for all I’m worth

#9 Stand back and watch suspiciously for drainage

#10 Rinse and Repeat until hair catcher sits in drain properly, then throw the plunger up against the wall because the whole process took so long, the hot water ran out.

I took the cover off the drain spout that sits on the wall of the tub and made a fascinating discovery. Old hardware that I suspect used to be part of a stopper system is mysteriously attached somewhere down in the drain, where I can’t see it. Unless I grow an eye that works like one of those mechanical probes doctors use in exploratory surgery. That would be so cool.

Due to my obsessive nature when it comes to these types of things, I’ve made the drain worse. And this morning, being the nice mom that I am, decided to gift my children with brand new light bulbs for their lamps and such in their bedrooms, and happened to peek in their bathroom.

Oh yeah. You guessed it. The sink was full of water. And not draining. No strong arming it this time. It’s a full-on clog. It could be marbles, beads, little tiny things only my kids would find. I’m told it was pieces of leaves, though I doubt the accuracy of that source.

By the way, have you ever tried plunging with one arm, while covering that other little hole with the other for maximum plunging? I think I just ripped my shoulder out of it’s socket.