Self Deprecation Is Healthy, Right?

I'm afraid, that I already ruined the punchline of this post by making the picture taken of the incident my Facebook profile picture. I've received no end of ribbing for it, but I figured there would be no harm--and, in fact, only good could come of it--in giving the full details of the event for the annals of history to decide. Oh, and the kids did some stuff this weekend, too.

It all started about a month ago. Well, longer than that, really. For the past year or so, we've been having problems with the drainage from our kitchen sink and dishwasher.

Our plumbing is a nightmare. See, our house is at least 106 years old. We've done some research into the records, and the earliest mention of our house that we could find was of when it was moved to this spot, in 1902. How long the house existed before it was moved, we have no idea, but it's been standing on the spot it is now for over a century.

When it was moved, concepts like climate control and plumbing were completely foreign, so, not surprisingly, the original owners of the house weren't that concerned with the crawl space under the house. Presumably, they figured they only reason they'd ever need to get under the house was to remove errant wildlife or, perhaps, to hide from a tornado. So they only left something like three feet of clearance.

When they eventually added plumbing and central venting, they didn't bother to dig out the space under the house any further. So, in spots, there is about a foot of clearance under the duct work--and, in other spots, there is no clearance at all. In fact, we cannot access the entire front half of our house because there isn't enough room to get under the obstacles.

AND, when some previous owner decided to add some rooms on to the back of the house (the bathroom, and the entry room we use for the washer and dryer, and possibly the kitchen), they did something even stupider than leaving a three foot crawl space--the back filled OVER the plumbing they installed, leaving no clearance and zero access to much of our house's plumbing. As I said, nightmare.

Needless to say, the plumbing they installed was cast iron, because that was cheaper than copper. Obviously, these owners suspected they would be dead or gone by the time this plumbing wore out, so why worry about it?

And now it is wearing out. Quite rapidly, in fact. For the past year or so, as I said before, the drainage has been terrible. We've managed, but it hasn't been pleasant, until about a month ago when things started backing up regularly. Because we're cheap, I tried to deal with it on my own--with a plunger and some muscle. To my surprise, it actually seemed to work. All of a sudden, the sink and dishwasher were draining well again!

And then the stink came. Libby was the first to catch a whiff (because I have a pretty dead sense of smell for some reason), and she swore it was coming from under the house. We thought maybe some mice or a rat or snake or a hobo or something had gotten underneath and died. No such luck. We opened the crawl space to find about four inches of sitting water under there--sitting water filled with the various discardings one would expect to come from a kitchen sink.

Ugh. So we had a plumber out to fix it. He replaced a section of worn pipe with some PVC and recommended we get a drain company out to clear the line. So last week we did that, and found that we had ANOTHER leak in the line. Then the drain company said it was impossible to clean out the line because it's too old and practically destroyed. Now we're waiting on the plumber to come out and tell us how much it will cost to put in as much new line as they possible can.

Double ugh.

The problem is, with two kids who use dishes like they are going out of style (and one female adult occupant who never met a glass she'd use more than once), we have scads of dishes to do on a daily basis--and only two sinks, the kitchen and the bathroom. Our bathroom sink is tiny and very poorly designed for doing dishes. So, I decided to do the dishes in the bathtub.

And how, you might ask, does one go about doing the dishes in a bathtub? Not easily, it turns out. Obviously it would be easy enough to fill the tub to soak the dishes, but then you don't have any clean water to rinse them off (without making a new pile then figuring out a way to rinse them in the bathroom sink, which would doubtless leave the bathroom a wet mess from all the wettening, transferring, and rewettening).

So I turned on the shower. Perfect solution! New water sprays down on the dishes making it possible to clean them and rinse them at the same time! I turned on the shower and set to work while I knelt down outside the tub. Only to get sopping wet from the haphazard sprays of the shower head, which was apparently not designed with washing and rinsing dishes in mind, for some reason.

The dishes in the tub. Quite a load, actually. We were in need of a run through the dishwasher before the plumbing fell apart, and this was a full day after that. There were, actually, more dishes that I'd already run through the bathroom sink and a few others that hadn't made it into the tub yet.

Thus I came upon another solution--one that I felt was not only a mult-tasking ingenuity, but a perfectly acceptable answer to my problem: I would sit in the tub with the shower running (and the drain open, so no water was sitting) and do the dishes!

The ultimate class act.

Yes, I know, terrible. Everything about it reeks of the Appalachian backwaters. But what other option was there that worked as well? There was none. And, sadly, I just got off the phone with the plumber and he said it would likely be Wednesday before they could make it out to fix the drain. We're already in need of another load of dishes, so it looks like it will be back in the tub with me some time today! Hurray!