The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Mama said there’d be days like this. You get up on a sunny hopeful morn, you take your shower, brush your teeth, wash the breakfast dishes, toss in a load of laundry, help yourself to another cup of joe. You’re psyched for another day in the mine, just glad to be alive. You go back in the bathroom, get rid of those first two cups of caffeine … and hear the sink gurgling like a bad gargle. Odd, you think. The kitchen sink chimes in, a drain duet. Then you noticed the toilet water isn’t going down, it’s coming up!

What the …? And then you find the bathtub filling up … with … omigod! With what should never be in your bathtub.

Who ya gonna call? Crapbusters? Being a modern South Ender, I postpone my optimism and pull the shades down on the mocking sun. Ain’t no sunshine when the sewage comes home to roost, trust me. Then I go to my computer and google up Invasion of the Turds, pass up the first ads and go to the How-To and You-Tube and the Suicide Hotline. I pick the How-To. The Hotline will come later, I’m half certain, but it’s a last resort. I have the internet — I have a global support team.

I’m no novice to this plumbing paradox, I pretty much know the bad news that’s coming. I’m just hoping to find a glimmer of hope, some yahoo who sez check the toilet float, jiggle it, you’ll be good to go. My ‘team’ focuses instead on more likely and infinitely worse diagnoses: a plugged sewer line, a ruined drainfield or a full septic tank. Pick yer poison! The tank was pumped recently so I’m down to 2 options. I choose the only one I can fix myself — the line.

That was yesterday. I started at the tank and dug down, found the line a few feet down, then trenched back toward the house. An old growth forsythia thwarted my forward progress. I sawed it off, whacked at its roots, chained it to my truck and jerked it out like a bad wisdom tooth. Sure I felt bad. For me! Its roots were what had clogged my line where the pipes had broken. Iron to clay to PVC. It was like an archeological dig through plumbing eras, Roman to modern.

Today I joined the new pipes, ran some serious water as a test then filled the grave. I tell you, there’s a damn good reason to keep the old outhouse!

Maybe you’re familiar with the cautionary crawler at the bottom of your screen after some amazing feat of derring-do or plain insanity has culminated in a wildly successful outcome: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. This could be the mantra of the mizzus whenever I attempt some Do-It-Yer-Damn-Self project that probably should be left to professional stuntmen. Or certified electricians and plumbers. Okay, I admit to nearly burning down the glass shack a few years back, coulda happened to anybody, really, or at least those who were brave enough to stand on a rubber truck tire and ground a 60 amp breaker without being knocked unconscious clear across the lawn. Or the electrical issue up at the rental house next door, something to do with wiring hots to colds or neutrals to partisans, never did figure it out but next morning the wire nuts were melted and scorch marks indicated another lucky break for Mr. DIY.

So when she wanted a new shower installed, maybe it made sense to hire it done by skilled tradesmen. To her it made sense. To me, I’m the yahoo who put the original one in when I built the house. And, just to be fair –to me—let’s acknowledge that I built the house. Did you build yours? Did she build ours? I think you see where I’m going with this. Yes, I decided to do it my own damn self.

I’m not going to bore you with too many details of this project. Other than to say right off the get-go, the drain for our old shower would not match any drain pan in the plumbing supply house’s catalog. And since our drain is buried half a foot in concrete, moving the line would have required a jackhammer and even then…. Well, maybe you see my dilemma. It took a day to dismantle the old shower, only breaking a couple of supply lines. The new shower pan had to be raised six inches on a platform to connect to the old drain. Again, I don’t want to bore you with the esoterica of neo-angle glass door installations but suffice it to say the instructions were meant for professionals who needed no instructions, not me.

Half a week later…. a few glitches, a few reversals of fortune, many curses and more than necessary alterations in plan, the new shower was installed, the woodworking surrounding it had been replaced with new varnished cedar and once again, Mr. DIY emerged scratched but victorious. Until the leaks began to show up behind the new cedar baseboards. Something I ignored for awhile, thinking maybe splash from the open door or … ?

If you know plumbing like I know plumbing, you understand that the gods of these subterranean pipes are cruel and capricious. If you don’t know that, you have no bizness messing with their turf. They will mess you up, amigo. They will break you. They will make you wish you had never been born. I wish that I’d never been born. Do you have any idea what it feels like to imagine a leak underneath the pan, probably in the drain connections, that will require dismantling the Entire Shower, the adjoining woodwork and probably necessitate a new pan? Or worse? Of course you don’t because I can barely imagine it. The horror, the horror!

Karen wants me to hire a pro. As if there were plumbers or bathroom remodelers waiting for my call. The ones I did call were too booked to even consider coming out. They have appointments deep into next year. So you know what this means, don’t you? I’ll be sure to let you know how this turns out the second time through….