Taking the Plunge

American Gothic Plunge

I begin this by stating that my husband, Ray, is one of the smartest people I know.  His vocabulary is so vast, he could have written the Thesaurus.  His wit and wordsmithing always keep me laughing.  He also writes songs, sings, plays guitar (and working on the harmonica) and records these creations.  As a retired computer programmer, Ray has become my computer guru.  He can fix almost all of my computer woes.  I could write a whole blog post singing praises to Ray, but I think that would make him uncomfortable.

That being said.....Ray is not a plumber....nor am I.  So, what do I do one evening when the kitchen garbage disposal vomits its contents into both sinks?  It was a complete surprise...no hint of a slow drain.  The water had disappeared so I tried the disposal again.  Something must be plugging it because the result was the same.  So, I hesitantly stuck my hand in the garbage disposal  (The disposal was NOT running.) to check for anything that could be clogging it.  Nothing...except gross pieces of 'stuff' sticking to my hand.  Yuk!  

At this time, I just had to tell Ray.  We had been watching the last episode of Fargo when I had gone into the kitchen to clean up.  I tend to leave the room at tense parts of that show. Anyway... I think it was about the time Ed and Peggy had locked themselves in the store freezer, hiding from some guy with a rifle...and someone was kicking at the freezer door.  That is when I called Ray in to assess the sink mess.  Thank goodness the show was recorded, so we did not miss the ending.

We decided to use the plunger...but where was it?  I found a small one in the upstairs bathroom, but it didn't work.  Ray finally found a large plunger somewhere in the basement.  We both plunged away, only to create a worse mess, and for some reason, more water.  Now there was about an inch of icky water in both sinks.

My solution....use Draino!  Of course, I did not think we had any.  I use vinegar and baking soda on our drains (but have neglected the kitchen!!!) and we never have (or had) clogged drains.  So off to the store to get something stronger to tackle the drain.  I returned with two bottles of Liquid Plumber...the kind that was supposed to eat through the clog and all we had to do was wait and then run hot water down the drain.  It did not work.  Now we had more water standing in the sink.  

Next step is to use a snake.  We bailed out as much water as we could and then I used a plastic Coke bottle to suction out most of the rest.   Ray was not successful in his search for the snake....so I ordered one from Lowes to pick up in the morning.  By this time it was about 9:00 and we were tired of working on the sink.  Plus, we wanted to find out what happened to Ed and Peggy. 

To see how our clogged drain fiasco ends...watch this YouTube.  I managed to take some video of the rest of the story......Snaking through the Clog.