Plumbing the depths...

This is how it began. I’m likely selling my house and needed to do some upgrades. The lovely man who was the interior painter served as the middleman for engaging two young men with expertise in laying laminate flooring. However….uh oh, getting ahead of myself.

Once the flooring was installed, within a short period of time, there was an unfortunate (and I’m being exceedingly kind) smell emanating from the master bathroom. Really, really unfortunate. OK, OK, now I gotta drop more money and contact a wildlife removal technician since my own troubleshooting led me to believe some poor critter had gotten into the crawlspace and died. (FYI, heavy-duty essential peppermint oil became my modern-day version of Glade for masking the, um, odor.)

Vernon, the wildlife removal expert showed up, and went into my crawlspace. With sadness, since I love animals, I awaited the news of what critter had met its demise beneath the master bathroom. Vernon, a taciturn kind of guy, came back inside the house, went into the impacted bathroom, flushed the toilet, and headed back to the crawlspace. Getting nervous, v-e-r-y nervous. Could some critter have gained access to the plumbing pipes? Vernon returned.

“It’s the toilet. It’s leaking sewage into your crawl space.” Trust me, my internal reaction to this diagnosis was about a 6+ on a seismic scale. One expletive did leak out, but I still offered my gratitude to Vernon for his work and paid him.

In embarrassing honesty, it’s not that I wanted a poor animal to meet its end in my crawl space. However, of the two possibilities, a deceased animal or a toilet leaking sewage, I admit to having preferred the former, a critter passing on in my newly upgraded, very dry, very clean crawlspace. Human….

Plumbers called, prayers said, plumbers arrived. Cutting to the chase, BOTH toilets had been incorrectly re-installed after the new laminate flooring was laid; both were leaking sewage…blah, blah, blah. The new laminate flooring in both bathrooms would need replacing as well as the sub-flooring. The two plumbers must have been psychotherapists in a past life. OK, yes, a few (but only a few) additional expletives leaked out. Nick and Lee were kind and supportive, noting that even more expletives might be warranted.

To avoid victimhood (a former addiction) and keep you reading, I’m not going to dive into all the details of the restoration company inspection, the insurance agent chat about my large deductible, or the friendly (really!) discussion with the middleman who engaged the floor installers. (Can this sentence get any longer?) Finally, it boiled down to the floor installer returning and rectifying the mistakes, at his cost. And, however kindly proffered, I turned down his offer, post-installation, to, once again, re-install both toilets so my plumbing bill would not get any higher. Nope, nope, nope!

So here I am at the end of this piece, plumbing its depths for a moral to this story. And, for the moment, all that comes to mind is gratitude for a sense of humor and, of course, the absolutely vital essential peppermint oil. Oh yes, the friends who put me up when I had no functioning bathrooms; the plethora of sympathetic puns about all the “crap” I was experiencing; OMG, plumbers who were mensches and wore capes; a very late-night animal cracker-eating party while watching the Dallas Cowboys (how embarrassing since I think football is brutal but the lateness of the hour AND the non-stop animal cracker consumption seemed to ease my judgments); and…..

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