The Sink From Hell

Through circumstances not relevant to this story I found myself living in the house in which I spent my childhood, in which I had lived from age 6 until I was 18. It’s a modest house, yet the four small bedrooms and two small bathrooms spread over two floors make it too large for just one person. Yet here I am.

And here, too, is the confounded first floor bathroom, with a sink that has been problematic for as long as I can remember. Water drains out of it at two speeds: slow and slower. It was always thus. When I was a lad, my dad would, on occasion, send me up on the roof with a sewer tape to run through the bathroom vent pipe all the way down to the sewer line in the cellar. We didn’t own a ladder that could reach the roof, so I had to climb out of a dormer window onto the 45-degree-slope shingled roof and work my way around the corner of the dormer while holding onto the only handhold available: the edges of the dormer’s roof shingles. It was a hair-raising experience due in part to the “slipperiness” of the shingles I stood on as their surface grit let loose underfoot, and in part to the knowledge that if I fell, I wouldn’t fall to the ground but directly into the concrete cellar stairwell. But snaking the bathroom vent line always got the water draining well again, and it became one of my chores. (Another rooftop chore was reconnecting twin-lead to the chimney-mounted tv antenna whenever a high wind tore it loose. I didn’t mind being on the roof. Heights didn’t bother me. Hell, a couple of times I jumped off the edge of the roof to the ground. I was a teenager. I was unbreakable. I could do anything.)

Every couple of weeks since moving back in, I’ve had to pour a bottle of drain opener into the bathroom sink to boost the ever-so-slow running drain back up a notch to just plain slow. This week was no different as I poured more drain gel down the drain, followed by boiling water. It barely made a difference. It was time to do something else.

Some people pour chlorine bleach into their drains. They swear it works. So I tried it. First, I flushed the drain gel away with water, then I poured a bottle of bleach into the drain. I left it to work its magic overnight. The next morning I ran water to see how well the bleach had worked. The result was: nothing. I might as well have poured a bottle of Evian into the sink for all the effect it had.

The brass-and-chrome p-trap was old and was getting corroded, so I bought a new plastic p-trap. When I removed the old p-trap I had direct access to the drain line, so I decided to snake the line.

Said drain line goes into the wall 2 or 3 inches, makes a 90° left turn and runs horizontally inside the wall for 20 inches. Then it tee's into a vertical pipe that runs up through the roof (the bathroom sewer vent) and down to the main sewer line in the cellar.

I snaked the drain as far as the tee but couldn't get past the tee. So I installed the new p-trap (ah, there’s a story there, too – every plumbing job I’ve done becomes a story) and ran water into the sink. As water filled the sink I turned off the faucet and to my dismay, the water didn’t run out at all. The drain line now seemed completely plugged.

It wasn’t, though. The water did drain out, just at an imperceptible rate. Leave and come back an hour later, and the water in the sink will be gone. Slow, slower, slowest.

I called a plumber – my regular, go-to plumber. The plumber has a really long motorized snake, and he snaked the line from the sink drain to the main sewer line in the cellar, but when he pulled the tool out, the line was still blocked. Water in the sink wouldn't drain, and now the water was black with nasty, oxidized, bio-matter goo that the snake had pulled out of the drain line. And, the motorized snake had flung the black nastiness everywhere. It was spattered across the plumber’s shirt, the sink bowl, the bathtub, the floor. He snaked it again all the way to the cellar, but again when he pulled out the snake the drain stubbornly remained plugged. He tried using a plunger in the sink but because of the sink’s design, he couldn't get pressure on the water.

Finally I told him that one of my chores as a boy was to occasionally take a sewer tape up to the roof of my house and run it down the bathroom vent pipe to open up the drain. (To be fair, he was probably arriving at the same conclusion.)

The plumber got out his ladder and went up on the roof and snaked the bathroom vent pipe all the way down into the sewer line and that did the trick. Problem gone. Of course, I could have done that and saved myself 76 bucks, except for two things: the part where I climb up to the roof, and the part where I climb down from the roof. Do not like to do that shit anymore. There was a tv show called "The Closer," and one character was gray-haired Lieutenant Provenza. When an investigation turned physical he was wont to tell his fellow cops: "I don't run", or "I don't hike", or "I don't climb."

You and me, Provenza: I don't do roofs.