The sink in the center bathroom vanity has been running slower and slower and…slowwwerrr…and this yesterday afternoon effectively stopped up.
Called my favorite plumber with a noticeable IQ and then some. No answer. I figure he’s either gone out of town for the 112-degree August moments, or shut down his business for the duration of the plague.
Call another outfit I’ve used in the past — they’re mostly in the drain cleaning business, which, I figure, probably fills the bill.
He says he’ll get here between 8 and noon. By 10:30 I figure…hmmmm….
More hours go by: no sign of second-choice plumber.
Put up a notice on the neighborhood Facebook page asking if anyone could recommend. Forthwith a guy posts that he’s watching answers, too, because when he called HIS guy, he was told the man had died at home from covid!
Aughh! I hope his guy was not my guy! Oh, my goodness, the guy is such a sweetheart. If he croaked over from this horrid disease, that would be a serious loss to just about everyone who knows him.
***
Meanwhile, the members of the ’Hood are agonizing on Facebook over we’re going to do about Halloween. Because we live in a middle-class to affluent enclave surrounded by low-income neighborhoods, we have a fantastical parade of wonderful little kids and teenagers (and parents!) all gussied up in crazy costumes, trucked to our precincts in pickups, sedans, and small buses. This begets a gigantic block party, where everyone hauls their gear out onto the driveways and sits around partying and admiring the style show. It’s the BIGGEST hoot.
Some folks are talking about maybe an event in the park, where candy can be handed out from tables. Others have pointed out that the way things are now, everyone is outside in the open air anyway, and pretty well “social distanced.”
****
Time passes…passes…passes
Just as I’m about to pick up the phone and call one of the neighbors’ recommended plumbers: Steven the alleged plumber calls and says he had “truck issues.”
Right. Sure.
Anyhow, he’s on his way. By now, though, I have two references to outfits the neighbors say can’t be beat.
****
3:21 in the afternoon…and Steven the Plumber shows up, only 3 1/2 hours late. Or 7 1/2 hours late if you figure in his demand that I be ready to receive his majesty at any time starting at 8:00 a.m: he was supposed to appear between 8 and noon. And…it’ll be his last appearance. Got two enthusiastic referrals to other companies from the FB neighborhood page.
And if I’d had an office job that I needed to get back to, while I was waiting an extra three and a half hours for this gent to surface??? Hmmmm…
****
The guy dorks around a bit and fails to unclog the pipe, which really just needs to be briefly rotorooted, right?
THEN he calls me in and gives me this WONDERFUL song and dance, to the effect that some amateur plumber has installed a messy lash-up under the sink and he can’t get his rooter in there to clean it out, and so he will have to take the entire thing apart and rebuild it. This will cost me $545.
I say well, that’s nice, but I don’t have $545, so I’ll just have to use the sink in the other bathroom. I send him out with an offer to pay the $145 base house call fee that he and his bosses had quoted earlier.
He, apparently certain that he has the hook set, says ohhh no, he’ll collect that when he comes back next Tuesday to revamp the plumbing…he still thinks he’s invited back, I guess.
Fortunately, I DO have another bathroom sink that I can use, because I can’t afford $545 on top of thousands of dollars worth of dental work: it’ll just have to stay unfixed. Privately I think THANK YOU FACEBOOK for providing a Neighborhood FB page, whereinat after I called this outfit three people gave me the names of their most highly recommended plumbers.
Shoo him out the door and forthwith call an outfit doing business as Maloney Plumbing. It comes equipped with rave personal reviews from three of the neighbors.
They promise to show up tomorrow afternoon. And waddaya bet they get it fixed in about 30 minutes?
****
Y’know… I moved into this house in 2009. That was 11 years ago. If Satan, the previous owner, had screwed up the plumbing as baroquely as this character says — he went on and on about how bizarre it is — that sink would’ve backed up long before this. (See the baroque photo, below…) And it has NEVER backed up until now, not in over a decade.
It is true, Satan was an inveterate do-it-yourselfer. And it is true, the lash-up in the middle bathroom looks different from the lash-up in the back bathroom (which is made of stainless steel, not plastic and is much simpler in design). But the lash-up in the kitchen, which was installed by real plumbers in my hire, is FAR more complicated, all plastic, and it never plugs up.
What d’you bet this guy figured he saw an easy mark and gave me a line of bull? Now, it’s possible that the sorta double U-turn you see there may be difficult or impossible to root out. But…whyyy do I doubt this? What, really, would be involved in unscrewing the black U-shaped section and cleaning out the pipes from there?
Welp, we’ll find out tomorrow. The guy from Maloney Plumbing is coming by between 12 and 2. This should be entertaining…
When I was living in an ancient place near Old Town Alexandria, VA the kitchen drain backed up. The plumbing in the place was weird, and the first two plumbers just walked out after taking a look at the plumbing. The third put together strings of words in combinations I’d not heard before, but he got the job done.
Your picture looks like some cross between a p-trap and an s-trap. I don’t know if that can contribute to clogging, but s-traps are generally not allowed by code because under the right conditions it can allow sewer gases to enter the house. Hopefully new plumber can get it working again.
Hmmmmm…. That would explain the plumber’s enthusiasm about THAT lash-up. Could be the $540 quote was actually modest…
The house is old(ish): built in 1972. So it’s possible there was already an s-trap there and Satan (or one of the previous Happy Handymen — the house has belonged to a succession of them) just connected a p-trap onto it. Well, today we’ll have a plumber from one of the two outfits the neighbors recommend to the stars…it’ll be interesting to see what he says.
I wouldn’t be too hard on your second-choice plumber on the basis of his late show. Truck trouble does happen, and jobs turn out to take longer than expected, and he may not have wanted to call (or thought to call) until he was certain he could get on the road.
I mean, it’s not great, but if that turns out to be his only flaw, and he’s done good work before, it might be worth keeping him on the backup list.Er, no pun intended.
It’ll be interesting to see what the next plumber has to say about the unconventional rig under the sink. Could be it’s one of those things that functions just fine until it doesn’t, or that it would be preferable but not absolutely necessary to replace it and bring it up to current code. If the next guy also suggests replacing it, it’ll be interesting to see how much he estimates for the job.
Exactly. More on that to come, whenever I get my act together enough to describe Act II of the Perils of Pauline’s Plumbing! 😀