Adventures in home ownership

First: Hi, Grandma!

All right, here’s the short story: I unclogged a toilet.

The long story (um, this may get gross): Yes, I have successfully unclogged toilets before. But — guess how many times we’ve used the toilet in the master bathroom of our new (to us) house since we moved in over a week ago? Zero. It makes a convincing flushing noise, so we didn’t catch it during the final walkthrough with the lid down, but it’s unusably weak, with a pathetic little gurgle at the end.

OK, fine, I grabbed the cheapie plunger we bought one late night at CVS several months ago and plunged. On the first push, that flimsy piece of rubber promptly flipped inside out like an old umbrella. Bah!

So Monday afternoon I stopped at Lowe’s and bought a proper plunger. Side note: apparently plungers are now too unsightly to keep (gasp!) uncovered in one’s bathroom. Nearly all of the plungers at Lowe’s are sold with some sort of fancy twisting plastic cover to hide the rubber part and keep it off the bathroom floor. You know, since the floor beside the back of the toilet in everyone’s bathroom is so pristine.

Anyway. So last Saturday I got out the rubber gloves and plunged the toilet. No change. I googled my options and tried the following: dish soap and hot water, baking soda + vinegar with more hot water (and before you laugh, this actually worked on a clogged sink drain at our apartment last year, so I figured it was worth a shot), and a wire coat hanger. Plus hot water. And more plunging.

Nothing. I must have plunged that stupid toilet 50 times.

Argh! Off to Lowe’s again for a toilet snake. I finally gave it a go tonight, and praying that I wasn’t unknowingly shoving a fat rubber duckie into the main line, I wrangled that snake as far into the toilet as it would go, carefully yanked it back out, and flushed.

Hmm... improvement?

What the hell, I’ve already paid 8 bucks for this stupid thing, so I figured I’d get my money’s worth and snake it again. Flush. Progress! And again. Fluuuushhhhhh!

Ahhh.

Thankfully, the whole process could have been a lot, A LOT, worse. So for extra credit, last night I killed* three crickets in our basement. Yeah... these aren’t the cute tiny crickets that we caught in glass jars as kids. Including legs, these guys are golf ball sized. Eww.


*um, this actually means I just sucked them up with the vacuum cleaner and am hoping that they’ll keel over before I have to empty the bag. :/