The Grossest Thing of Our Lives!

Warning: If you are eating food or just ate food in the last hour or are about to eat food in the next hour, you may want to hold off on reading this blog post.  It is pretty darn disgusting and I don't want anyone throwing up food or loosing their appetite because of us.  This post would be good to read if you are on a diet and are trying to not eat as much :)

In the beginning of the week as I was doing dishes our sink stopped draining.  Eek!  I had put a bit more than the normal food down the garbage disposal, so I ran the disposal some more, but the water was not going any where.  I looked up some YouTube videos to see if I could easily fix the problem before Charles got home from work.  I wanted to secretly impress him with my nonexistent handyman skills.  I couldn't get it fixed.  When Charles got home he wasn't super thrilled, but it seemed a pretty manageable project that we could do.

He worked on it that evening and we were sure that the next evening he would be able to solve the problem.  Each night we thought this same thought all week long.  We seemed soooo close to figuring it out each night and figured that by the next day we will have it cleared pretty quick.  We did plunging, drano, and snaked it.  Charles took apart all of the pipes he could reach.  Saturday came and we had no clean dishes, the kitchen was a wreck and we had planned a date for the afternoon and had a babysitter coming over.  So we started trying to clean like mad.  Charles cleaned up the general kitchen stuff while I washed dishes in the bathroom.  I felt like one of those hoarder people that hoard so much junk that they can't even use their kitchen so they wash their dishes in the bathroom.  I felt like a freak, but we got it presentable.

After our date Charles drilled a hole into the larger 2" pipe in the basement that the kitchen sink drains into to see if he could drain all of the water and the cut into it a little bit to clear out the blockage.  After he drilled the water wasn't really dripping out.  We were pretty darn perplexed.  Charles sawed out a two foot section of the 8' long pipe and we found out that the pipe was pretty much completely clogged with 20 years worth of sludge (look at below photo if you dare).  Charles slowly cut the 8' pipe into two foot sections so that he could catch the little water in each section of pipe.  As he was cutting out a piece of pipe closest to the kitchen sink tons of water dumped out everywhere in the basement.  Even though Charles was wearing safety glasses Charles got some of the liquid in his eyes.  He raced upstairs to the shower to rinse out his eyes since we had poured drano down the drain a few days earlier and it couldn't drain out because of the clog.  It had gotten watered down, so it wasn't as scary as pure drano from the bottle, but we did call Poison Control.  Charles won't go blind (we hope) and his eyes feel pretty good.

We are glad that Charles decided to fix the problem instead of hiring a plumber to come out to the house and have him spend hours and hours to make a hole through the sludge with his snake.  Then he would have had to come out every year to come do the same thing.  So instead of a HUGE plumber's bill Charles has spent $32 on new pipe, pipe glue, snake, and drano.  Now we will have a perfectly cleared pipe.  Charles was talking to our Home Teacher (he knows lots about construction and such) about the problem at church and he said that pipes get clogged like this because of grease going down the drain.  The grease cools in the pipes and then collects crud on it and the layers slowly build over the years.

It makes me want to talk to the prior owners of the home and say, "By the way, you shouldn't be putting grease down the drain.  Ever!"  Nothing like getting stuck with the problem created by someone else.  Oh well, it was a good learning experience and I am glad that it is all over.  Well, we are still trying to clean things up and get all of the nasty smell out of the house.