drains

When we built our house I decided it had to have two bathrooms.

That was very unusual for a thousand feet house (OK 1080 feet). We had 3 daughters still at home and I was not willing to share baths with them every day, selfish me.

The house was all built on the tightest budget iminagable. I barterd with electiricians, heating guys, general contractors to get materials and skills to build the house.

Often it would have been better if we had had a bit more to put in it, but we did not want to borrow money to build, and so we just did it. This decade I have been going back room by room to refurbish: paint, carpet, and wide molding and work to what might have been an arts and crafts look. Mostly.

I got to the down stairs bathroom was a few years ago. The owner of the company I was working for at the time, gave me a jetta tub and the faux marble panels for the shower as a bonus. (The year before he gave me a very nice motor boat as a bonus). The tub worked out well, the faux marble even covered the ceiling. While I was at it I made new cabinets, put ceramic tile on the floor and painted fresh new colors.

But the drain has not worked well almost from the beginning. A while back I washed out a paint bucket in the tub and when it did not drain I was sure that I had clogged the trap, which is not easy but it can be done.

So today I got David’s Jackhammer out, cut out a bit of the wall plate and made a new header, then started hammering out the concrete. It was a hard old slab. It so noisy I brought some hearing protectors over and gave one to Miriam as well, and she wore it.


But as I dug deeper I discovered that the wash machine drained into that line before the trap. If the trap was clogged, the washer would be over flowing, but it was not.

I could not figure how to disassemble the drain from the inside of the tub. So I called David, who is 500 miles away at his sick mother in law’s house. He had me buy a “drain wrench” for eight bucks. But when I got that part off (David was right, of course) What I saw made me know that the problem had not been the trap at all.

The drain was full of hair and stuff and stuff. I spent some time taking it apart then cleaning it all up, (Miriam helped with the cleaning). And then put it back together.

I called David. He laughed and said: “I hate it when the solution is something simple” especially after spending a lot of time and energy with a complex solution."

But now that tub drains big time.

Ahh. Life is good.