2005/12/29

Thar she blows....

This is a story of how when life really sucks, it blows.

On or about 10 DEC 2005, my wife used our downstairs bathroom. When she hit the flush lever, the toilet bowl filled with water and failed to flush, followed quickly by a stream of water shooting out of the base of the toilet. I shut off the water supply and once the toilet bowl drained out onto the bathroom floor, the water stopped leaking. I mopped everything up, called the landlord to complain and closed the bathroom door. I would have put up the yellow crime scene tape, but I didn't have any on hand.

But wait there's more...

As you may have noticed, we just moved into this house and are still getting settled. There were no prior tenants, so we are discovering all of the new house problems. So, Monday, 12 DEC 2005 rolls around and we are busy hooking up the washer and dryer. Beyond a quick leak test on the washer, I did not do a test run. Monday night, I was upstairs messing with the computer setup, while my wife is running our first load of laundary. My wife screams something about water on the floor. I head back downstairs and find the carpet is soaked on the first floor and water is apparently coming out from under the bathroom door. I open the door and find brown water and raw sewage covering our bathroom floor, with evidence in the toiled bowl indicating it blew chunks all over the floor. An ironic twist. Laundary service is shut down and I start laying down cardboard to cover the wet carpet, since we have cats and a baby likely to crawl through the area.

It takes a few days, but final analysis is that the outside sewer line had become partially blocked. The upstairs shower and toilets probably had enough head pressure to push past the blockage, but the first floor toilet and washer did not, leading to our little weekend shit explosion.

Now I am sure you are thinking, how could things get worse for our intrepid heros? Wait for the next post. It may be a little while, because the wounds are still a little raw.

3 comments:

Alina said...

Lots and lots of problems. I thought we had it bad, no offense. Well, we still do have it bad, but at least our toilet didn't overflow. Not for a while, anyways...

Alina said...

Lots and lots of problems. I thought we had it bad, no offense. Well, we still do have it bad, but at least our toilet didn't overflow. Not for a while, anyways...

Alina said...

sorry, I didn't mean to comment the same message twice. It caught me off guard. Bie! :0D