It never rains but it pours, part 1
May. 3rd, 2022 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: (fairly strong) unsanitary]
On Saturday morning we had a plumber in to fix the toilet. It was a bit loose: when one leaned forward on it, water beaded up around the edge.
She fixed it as best she could, but had to replace some screws and remove some silicone. It was a weird setup, she said. Probably the previous owners cobbled it together on their own.
We also got a quote on the cost of repairing some hard-water damage near our water heater (as I mentioned on Tumblr recently, our water softener is failing). It was actually cheaper to buy a year of plumbing insurance instead (apparently that's a thing), so we did. It was even retroactive to the beginning of the day, covering the current visit.
---
At 6:30 AM on Monday, I woke up to a dripping noise.
The ceiling directly below the toilet was dripping. Into a hand towel, meaning that I wasn't the first person to notice.
I *was*, however, the first person to notice who knew where a bucket was off the top of my head. I moved it into place.
When I flushed, the drip sped up. I work evenings and it was essentially the middle of my night, and I don't think the plumbers are even open at 6:30 anyway.
I went back to bed and, eventually, to an uneasy sleep.
---
The drip had stopped by the time I woke up at 10. Apparently if you go long enough without using the pipes, it slows down to zero.
We called the plumbers back. They said they'd be by at some point in the afternoon, depending on how long other jobs took.
Over the course of the day, we learned that *any* use of the bathroom pipes triggered a leak below the toilet. No showers, no handwashing in the sink.
They--a different pair, not the person from last time--didn't make it over until about 4:30. They took a look and determined that this was going to be a complicated job and they had neither the time nor the parts to do it immediately.
They were relieved to learn we'd bought the plumbing insurance. So was I: it meant not having to argue with the company about how much of it they were liable for, since they'd essentially agreed to be held financially liable for the next year *regardless* of whether things were their fault.
---
So, we thought. It's going to be at *least* overnight, maybe longer.
Time to break out the quarantine toilet I bought last year.
It's a five-gallon bucket with a toilet-seat-shaped lid (this was, at the time and in the country I was looking, cheaper than buying a plain five-gallon bucket and a separate toilet-seat attachment), lined with a heavy-duty trash bag, and a jug of scented kitty litter on hand to keep things dry and cover up the smell. Plus a bottle of hand sanitiser on the counter.
I forgot to get a kitty-litter scoop, but a 1/3-cup measure from the kitchen will do. Hey, it's a good opportunity to stress-test the system, with a disaster limited to a single room in our house. We can still wash up in the kitchen sink (though all that stair-climbing is hard if you're Mom, hence the hand sanitiser); we can, if it comes down to it, walk over to the business district and use a public toilet.
It's going pretty well so far. Bit weird, but not much more so than using *any* toilet other than the one I'm accustomed to, and the scent of the kitty litter seems to be helping a lot.
---
The main problem with this setup is that the bucket toilet probably can't support Mom's weight.
The good news is, she happens to own a commode specimen collector (colloquially a "hat"). Which should, in theory, let her keep using the regular toilet and just dumping the results into the bucket afterward.
...in practice, she says, it didn't work very well for number two. She did not want to talk about it.
(I remembered the next morning: oh yeah, one time I read some prepper pointing out that you can convert a regular toilet into a bucket toilet by draining the bowl and lining it with another heavy-duty trash bag. So we'll be doing that this afternoon, and it should make things much more feasible for Mom.)
---
We heard back from the plumbers this morning. They won't get a chance to come back until Friday morning. We're stuck with this all week.
I'm grateful to my past self for contemplating toilet-access disruptions, researching solutions, and taking action. This was perhaps not precisely a scenario I had in mind (though I did think about water outages), but there's a lot of crossover between one scenario and the next.
---
(part 2)
On Saturday morning we had a plumber in to fix the toilet. It was a bit loose: when one leaned forward on it, water beaded up around the edge.
She fixed it as best she could, but had to replace some screws and remove some silicone. It was a weird setup, she said. Probably the previous owners cobbled it together on their own.
We also got a quote on the cost of repairing some hard-water damage near our water heater (as I mentioned on Tumblr recently, our water softener is failing). It was actually cheaper to buy a year of plumbing insurance instead (apparently that's a thing), so we did. It was even retroactive to the beginning of the day, covering the current visit.
---
At 6:30 AM on Monday, I woke up to a dripping noise.
The ceiling directly below the toilet was dripping. Into a hand towel, meaning that I wasn't the first person to notice.
I *was*, however, the first person to notice who knew where a bucket was off the top of my head. I moved it into place.
When I flushed, the drip sped up. I work evenings and it was essentially the middle of my night, and I don't think the plumbers are even open at 6:30 anyway.
I went back to bed and, eventually, to an uneasy sleep.
---
The drip had stopped by the time I woke up at 10. Apparently if you go long enough without using the pipes, it slows down to zero.
We called the plumbers back. They said they'd be by at some point in the afternoon, depending on how long other jobs took.
Over the course of the day, we learned that *any* use of the bathroom pipes triggered a leak below the toilet. No showers, no handwashing in the sink.
They--a different pair, not the person from last time--didn't make it over until about 4:30. They took a look and determined that this was going to be a complicated job and they had neither the time nor the parts to do it immediately.
They were relieved to learn we'd bought the plumbing insurance. So was I: it meant not having to argue with the company about how much of it they were liable for, since they'd essentially agreed to be held financially liable for the next year *regardless* of whether things were their fault.
---
So, we thought. It's going to be at *least* overnight, maybe longer.
Time to break out the quarantine toilet I bought last year.
It's a five-gallon bucket with a toilet-seat-shaped lid (this was, at the time and in the country I was looking, cheaper than buying a plain five-gallon bucket and a separate toilet-seat attachment), lined with a heavy-duty trash bag, and a jug of scented kitty litter on hand to keep things dry and cover up the smell. Plus a bottle of hand sanitiser on the counter.
I forgot to get a kitty-litter scoop, but a 1/3-cup measure from the kitchen will do. Hey, it's a good opportunity to stress-test the system, with a disaster limited to a single room in our house. We can still wash up in the kitchen sink (though all that stair-climbing is hard if you're Mom, hence the hand sanitiser); we can, if it comes down to it, walk over to the business district and use a public toilet.
It's going pretty well so far. Bit weird, but not much more so than using *any* toilet other than the one I'm accustomed to, and the scent of the kitty litter seems to be helping a lot.
---
The main problem with this setup is that the bucket toilet probably can't support Mom's weight.
The good news is, she happens to own a commode specimen collector (colloquially a "hat"). Which should, in theory, let her keep using the regular toilet and just dumping the results into the bucket afterward.
...in practice, she says, it didn't work very well for number two. She did not want to talk about it.
(I remembered the next morning: oh yeah, one time I read some prepper pointing out that you can convert a regular toilet into a bucket toilet by draining the bowl and lining it with another heavy-duty trash bag. So we'll be doing that this afternoon, and it should make things much more feasible for Mom.)
---
We heard back from the plumbers this morning. They won't get a chance to come back until Friday morning. We're stuck with this all week.
I'm grateful to my past self for contemplating toilet-access disruptions, researching solutions, and taking action. This was perhaps not precisely a scenario I had in mind (though I did think about water outages), but there's a lot of crossover between one scenario and the next.
---
(part 2)
