Holy Moly, Check Out This Pipe!

I have found treasures of all descriptions on craigslist.org but by far the greatest of all is my handyman Mike.

My initial call for help with my crumbling kitchen windows last summer turned into the refurbishment of every window in my 1926 Tudor home.  When that project was finished, Mike started replacing rotting exterior trim.  He stuffed pink insulation into every large gap he saw, and caulk into the small ones.  My December National Grid bill was 30 percent lower than December of ’08 even though it was a colder month this year.

I would have done all of this years ago had money not been an object, but with four growing children headed to college, money was an object so I put off the repairs.  Mike was so conscientious and reasonably priced I ran out of excuses to procrastinate any further.  I joked through the many months of Mike on the job that he was the Miracle of my Summer.

Summer turned to autumn and a host of new projects.  Could he paint the house, strip the exterior doors, sand down the tops of the radiator boxes with varnish grown cloudy with age?  Would he help me design and replace the top of the built-in corner cabinet in the dining room that was ruined when the former owners cut a speaker through the woodwork?  Those doors that stick; could he plane them down?  The brass hardware on the windows.  It was tarnished and painted and stained.  Might he remove them all so I could polish them one by one, and then could he put them back on? Two latches per window, four screws per latch?  Would he install the curtain rod into the masonry wall in the sun room?  When Mike saw me hauling leaves into the woods behind the house, he devoted an afternoon to dragging the heavy tarps that I loaded up with heavy damp oak leaves.  By then I was telling him he was the Miracle of my Year.

Well, it’s a whole new miracle year.  Two nights ago I did something really dumb.  I dumped coffee grounds into the sink instead of walking them into the bushes in the cold outdoors.  The sink plugged up.  Of course.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done something dumb like that so I’m pretty good at dismantling the pipes beneath the sink to free the clogged spaghetti, or one too many egg shells.  This time, the clog would not budge.  I couldn’t even find it.  The plastic pipes were clean when I took them apart.  So once again I called Mike.

I knew it was a bad sign when Mike couldn’t budge the clog either.  As I was cooking dinner with the downstairs bathroom sink, Mike tried everything before declaring that I needed a new waste pipe in the basement.  The old galvanized pipe was likely so narrow with decades of sludge and deteriorated metal that nothing would go through, no matter how much he snaked and plunged.

Mike goes spelunking under my kitchen sink

This morning Mike arrived with his customary smile, good manners, tools and Superhero powers and in short order he gave me a brand spanking new plastic PVC pipe!   Who needs perfume and baubles?  That stuff’s for sissies.  I’ve got PVC!  All the way to the 6 inch cast iron waste main!  It’s Christmas morning all over again!   The water flows like crazy.

Now the scary part.  Check out the pipe.  I asked Mike if it’s the worst he’s seen but by the time he gets called to old houses he says every galvanized pipe looks this way.  Thank goodness. I wouldn’t want him to think less of me for keeping pipes like this, but he did ask what lesson I had learned from all of this.  Then the smile left my face and my eyes cast downward, sort of like my dog when she does a bad thing, and I told Mike I would never be so dumb as to put coffee grounds down the sink again.

Yup, that tiny hole is all the clearance left after 8 decades of draining the kitchen sink

Tagged as: clogged pipe, home improvement, kitchen, pipe