Call me Mr. Plumber

Plumbers crack and cursing free of charge.

Ever since my Wife and I moved into our house, the sink in the bathroom has been slow. Occasionally, it would stop draining all together and we’d pour a couple bottles of drano down the drain and it would go back to it’s same old slow self. I knew that eventually, the drano would cease to work and something would have to be done about it.

Well, that time finally came. The Drain stopped cold on Thursday evening and on Saturday morning, I headed to the local Wal*Mart to buy myself a pipe wrench and a new trap for the drain.

New parts purchased, I commenced with tearing the old trap off of the sink. To my surprise, the trap was empty… Not a good sign.

After some short cursing spells and a cigarette, I went back to work tearing off the piece of pipe that connects to the house’s plumbing. Of course, this is where murphy’s law comes in and the fitting that connects the two is so corroded that the nut literaly breaks in two.

After quite a bit of shaking and shimmying, the pipe comes off and lo and behold, what a mess. The elbow of pipe that leads down into the sewer is clogged up pretty good. I retrieve a screw driver to begin digging around in the pipe to try and free something up.

1 rather decent size(1″ ish) ball of wax, 3 plastic hair tie bands, and some other random gunk later and it was time to put it all back together.

I want to stop here to ask a question. How does a ball of wax end up in a sink drain? The rest of the stuff I found is explainable. The wax? My best guess is that someone poured melted wax down the drain and it somehow managed to form a ball in the drain.

Anywho, so I had broken the nut that held the one pipe to the pipe in the wall so I went scavenging for parts in the brand new, uneeded, trap. Sure enough the nuts from the trap fit the pipe in the wall and I was back in business.

All back together and now the sink drains better than it has since we bought the place.

You can call me Mr. Plumber.

ARGGG!  Now the sink in the basement is backing up when the clothes washer goes through the spin cycle.  The above problem and the new problem are unrelated, but it looks like the new problem is going to take a real plumber to fix.

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