When it rains...it pours...all over the floor
I just need to vent.
This afternoon, I discovered a not-insubstantial amount of brackish, nasty water on the floor outside the bathroom near my office. No, I do not have any pictures. I shut off the water to the toilet therein, which appeared to be the source, flushed, let it drain (which it appeared to do OK), and turned the water back on.
A little while later, I found a HUGE AMOUNT of nasty, poo-water backflowing over the edges of the toilet, and (adding insult to injury) I discovered that the float inside the toilet stuck, meaning the toilet kept pumping nasty water all over the floor.
Needless to say, I shut off the water and began mopping up this nasty concoction, which luckily had NOT spread into any carpeted areas (but nonetheless made a nice little lake in part of the basement area), dropping every towel we had in the house onto the area to sop up this nasty marsh-muck come to visit.
After having someone come and look at the trap on the toilet (“It’s clean") and the main trap to the sewer (“Yucky, but should flow OK—no problems in there!”) we discovered, after a bit of trial and error, that one of the main sewage pipes in the house must be clogged, necessitating the use of a 40+ foot sewer snake (which of course we did not have this evening). So tomorrow late morning we get to go through this lovely exercise again.
So after all this is done, I gather up the sopping wet poo-water-towels and carry them to the washing machine in the neighboring room. (Thank Dog I didn’t have to carry them through the whole house.) I start up a load of wash and go upstairs to deal with Other Issues.
After everyone has gone to bed, I return to my office to get some work done, only to find that the trap in the utility sink into which my washing machine drains must leakWRONG SEE BELOW, because now there is yet another flood all over the floor in the utility room, this time extending into the carpeted area in my office—so now the carpet under the machinery in the office is nice and damp.
Lovely, and other nice Anglo-Saxon words.
So now all that is cleaned up, another load of wash (second pass for the towels, which got called upon to try to clean up the utility/heater room) and a load in the dryer, and hopefully that is all the excitement for this evening.
Oh did I mention that I’m solo parenting tonight, as Elana is out at the Brooklyn Pediatric Society meeting this evening?
I know, I know...I can hear your violins playing sad songs for me...and I know exactly where I can find sympathy...
NOTE: I just discovered that it is not a leaky pipe (that would require replacing) but evidently the utility sink is backing up in the same way that the toilet was...so it's draining ever so slowly, and also bringing up sewer water onto the floor (and now, I presume, onto the carpet! ugh.)