Plumbing Drama

Last week, we had some drama with our plumbing. We were getting ready to go to the Temple to serve last Friday night. I took a shower, and half hour later, Mike went in to shower and none of the water had drained.

So, he grabbed the plunger and went at it.  Nothing progressed, but he did get a lot of black gunk back up out of the drain.

So he figured that he would clean out the trap.  Now, our house was built in the 1950s, and the tub and drain system is that old.  It's not a nice "goose neck" trap, it's basically a cast iron canister.  He spent a good 45 minutes to half an hour trying to open the trap and clean it out. He couldn't get the nut to budge.

So he did the next best thing. After calling the Temple and excusing ourselves for the night, Mike went to Home Depot and bought a plumbing snake and some super powered drain cleaner chemicals.  He didn't just get any plumbing snake, he got one that attaches to his drill.

2 hours later and he's pulled out enough hair and dirt to make anyone feel sick, but the water STILL isn't going down.  So he pours the drain cleaner into the tub and lets it sit for half hour.

Upon returning to the bathroom half hour later, the water is just slowly finishing draining out of the tub.  He refills the tub to rinse out the drain cleaner, because you don't want that stuff sitting in your pipes, and the tub backs up again. He goes back at it with the plumbing snake....

...and pulls out another mass of matted hair and something else... something that looks suspiciously like rawhide, and in fact, was rawhide.

Apparently, sometime in the past year, our dog Dale had decided to "bury" his bone in the tub. (He likes to "bury" his bones in random corners, covering them up either with imaginary dirt or he'll drag a piece of laundry or towel and cover them).  The little rawhide stick must have fallen into the drain since we don't have a screen on it.  It then went down the pipes about half way through the house and as water repeatedly ran through the pipes, the rawhide slowly softened, untwisted, and filled most of the pipe and caught all the hair going down the drain.

It was disgusting and now we're careful to keep the shower-curtain closed on the tub (for some reason, he won't try and go through the curtain) or the bathroom door closed. Especially when he has a bone.

Our water is draining beautifully now!