My mom has been having problems with a drain in the basement. It seems that when she washes clothes, the drain backs up and begins to spill across the floor. The "flooding" has never gotten very far--maybe a foot from the drain itself. But it's still an inconvenience and could become a bigger problem. That, along with a fussy toilet, led her to call a plumber last week.
Well, on Friday morning, the day the plumber was to come, the salt for our water softener arrived. The workman carried three bags into the basement and emptied them into the tank. A short while later, Mom went down to check on the laundry and discovered a new flood, not from the drain, but from the water softener. We took off the lid, and the tank appeared to be full of mud. The flooding seemed to have stopped and hadn't gotten into anything important, so I told her that I'd call the company later in the day, once the plumber had come.
I kept checking on the softener throughout the day, and the water seemed to be receeding or drying up. In the early afternoon I checked on it again and noticed some instructions on the softener's tank. From reading that, I thought that the tank's timer was off (it said noon instead of 2:00), so I reset the time. The machine started going through its cycle, and I watched it for a few minutes to make sure that the water wasn't spreading again before heading upstairs. I continued to check on it periodically but didn't notice any problems.
The plumber arrived in the late afternoon. After fixing the toilet, we went downstairs to look at the drain. I turned the corner, and lo and behold, water had spread all across the floor. Thankfully, the plumber knew how to turn off the water softener and kill its cycle. I went to look for rags while he dealt with the floor drain (on the opposite side of the room, of course, with no water near it). After a few tests, he determined that the clog was in a main pipe running underneath the basement floor and said he would have to come back next week with a machine to clear the pipe. He also said that I needed to call the softener company right away.
However--and this is where he's already achieved beatification in my book--before leaving he said that due to the size of his machine, we would have to get rid of a large section of boxes in the middle of the basement. I've been bugging my mom for one week short of a year to let me throw out our amazing basement belongings overflow.
Last night, one week before I'm planning to leave town, it began.
Around 7:30 we went downstairs and started cleaning out flooded things (which mold at an amazing rate) and unflooded boxes. The garbagemen are going to think that we're moving. As we went through the boxes, we pulled out some great memories and had some terrific laughs--one so hard that Mom had to run to the bathroom and I almost had an asthma attack. We set aside a few boxes to keep, a few things to go to a local charity, and a large box of items to go to our local college's costume department. We stopped around 10:30, a little more than halfway through the pile, because I was getting really sleepy and couldn't continue my job of garbage hauler very well. Hopefully we'll finish that section up this afternoon.
So here's to the the venerable Bergin Bros. plumbing company, flooding drains and overflowing water softeners--all divine entities providing impetus and purpose for a change long desired, a challenge well-met, and a job well-begun.
Posted by at July 25, 2004 8:15 AM