Yeah, I know, but its how I am.

They look like fancy blowdarts made of metal, and look really cool garnishing a well-crafted cocktail.

This house is old, and apparently flippers or amateur contractors got in at some point and rather than installing iron pipes with eased curves, they went with PVC, and some pretty impractical pipe joins.

So there have been clogs before and usually I was able to work them free.

But apparently ground up apple peels running down a narrowed pipe during the first good cold snap of the season made for perfect conditions to lock that pipe down.

So I replaced the dispose-all. Works lovely. Nice quiet whirr.

Nope.

Checked the P-trap (curved pipe headed toward the wall).

All clear P trap, but clog is still down there somewhere.

So, I tried hot water.

Nope.

baking soda and vinegar and hot water.

Lots of fizz, but NOPE.

Then the noxious chemicals from the clog aisle came home on 5 separate degrading trips to the local Lowes. The clog aisle with the plumbing supplies is terrifying. There’s lots of chemicals that should never be near each other all on the same shelf, some even in the same bottles wrapped in plastic marked PELIGRO in big warning letters, and lots of bottles of stuff that’s “guaranteed to work or its free” but the process to get your refund will take you more man-hours to do than just eating the cost and moving on.

All of them in various configurations with and without hot water found their way down the pipe along with trick plungers, augurs that don’t work too well on PVC with sharp turns, and lots of bailing out the sink and sequestering my dogs to my office as I carry buckets of smoking evil from the kitchen into the toilet and flush it down.

My eyes ached. My body ached.

Do you know how horrible it is to not have coffee in the morning or at all during the day and have to do stuff like this?

So I went on Next Door, typed “plumber” in the search bar to pull up recommendation threads and picked someone who got good recommendations, was reasonably priced, cared about his work.

I tend to stay away from the big-name folks when it comes to stuff like plumbing in an old house, because they seem to train the new young guns to up-sell everything and find random things that NEED TO BE FIXED RIGHT NOW OR YOU”LL PERISH IN FLAMES, but delivered in a folksy calm voice.

I’m tired and haven’t been caffeinated for 3 days, the headaches from withdrawal are bringing out the stabby side of my personality, so a nice dude who has his own gear, is a master plumber, and is open to side jobs after his main job is done sounded like the ticket.