Plumbing Problems

Several weeks ago, Kevin noticed that the toilet on the main floor was leaking. There was a hairline crack in the mechanism that indicates that the tank is full. It wasn't closing fully, so water was just running through continuously. He shut off the toilet until he had time to deal with it, and we just used the other toilets for a while. One of the perks of having multiple bathrooms is that it's not the end of the world when one of them breaks. (One of the downsides is that you have to clean all of them).

When he found the time over the weekend, Kevin got the replacement pump and set about installing it in the toilet. This shouldn't be all that difficult, but it turned out to be. First, unscrewing the original pump turned out to be a two-person job. I had to hold it still so it wouldn't just spin around and around. There must be an easier way to do this, but we probably didn't have the right tools. Then things didn't quite match and what had been a steady leak inside the toilet that could simply be turned off, turned into a slow but steady leak into a bowl underneath the toilet.

I'm not sure where this leak was coming from, as I know almost nothing about plumbing (I know some very basic things from the day I spent hooking up a water cooling tank thing in my undergrad lab, but it was mostly following instructions from someone else because I was small enough to fit in the corner with the piping). At any rate, we lived with that for a few days, hoping to get a plumber in after our Halloween party.

But then the leak got worse. A lot worse. Whereas the bowl underneath the toilet had previously needed emptying every day or so, it now filled up twice an hour. It wasn't the sort of thing we could leave overnight, let alone while we were hosting a huge party.

This was on Thursday night. Guests were due to begin arriving Friday evening with the big party taking up most of Saturday. Kevin called a plumber hoping to get the toilet fixed as soon as possible. The earliest the guy could make it out was Friday morning. And since the leak was bad enough that we couldn't leave it, we turned off water to the entire house.

Friday morning was not fun. I'd filled some water bottle with water the night before and made sure the tea kettle was full, but there's only so much you can do. I couldn't shower in the morning, and I ended up taking my toothbrush to work with me, trying not to breath anyone on the metro. Thankfully we got it fixed in time for the party, only for the next plumbing disaster to pop up.

People are drunk enough at Hallowiener that something usually breaks. This is just part of throwing the party. One year I shattered a glass. One year someone kicked a hole in our wall. This year someone dropped a glass in the sink, resulting in a garbage disposal full of glass shards. I got as many out as I could, but a few had fallen beyond my reach. I made the executive decision to just not deal with it that night, and told people not to use the garbage disposal.

Life without a garbage disposal isn't quite as difficult as I feared. I kept having to remind myself that I couldn't use it, but peeling potatoes into the garbage can instead of the sink isn't really that much of a burden. Between the minimal impact the lack of disposal had on our life, and all the other clean up from the party, it took us a week to actually deal with the broken disposal. I was worried we'd have to call in a plumber again, but it turned out to be a pretty easy fix. All in all it only cost about $7 for a specific Allen wrench.

Now we're just crossing our fingers that the law of threes doesn't apply here. I really don't want to deal with another plumbing problem in the coming weeks.