A Hairy Situation

I have long hair. It likes to escape down the drain when I shower and the new drain cover didn't do a very good job of stopping it. So every few weeks D has to do a minor unclog. He's become quite the plumber and insists that he doesn't mind. And it only takes him a few minutes.

Recently, however, we had a clogged drain that resisted all of our "quick" attempts at unclogging (mostly all related to the miraculous Zip-It). When that didn't work, D pulled off all of the drain hardware and used an actual plumbers' snake to try to fix the problem. Still no luck. Our temporary solution was to switch to using the other shower and wait until we had more time to deal with it (we avoid chemical drain cleaners because of the fumes and our fear that they will eat through our very old pipes).

That worked pretty well until I decided to fill up the sink in the bathroom to do some hand wash laundry and then let it drain all at once. It would seem that the sink and tub were connected enough that letting a sink full of water go down the drain sent a back-up of sludge into the tub. Oops!

Fast forward past the part where we scrambled for towels and did quick damage control on most of the gunk.

Because D had removed the drain, the pipe wasn't fully connected to the tub and the water back-up allowed water to drain past the pipe and into the walls. Fortunately we have an access panel in our bedroom to get to the leak. It very nearly filled up the little plastic container we managed to shove in to catch the leak (most of the leak - some got onto the wood, so we kept the panel open for quite a while with a box fan circulating the air).

Waiting until we had more time to deal with the clog stopped being an option. We were dealing with the clog "now" (which, of course, wasn't a very good time, but isn't that always the case?).

Step one was to use plumbers' putty to reseal the area around the pipe and to reinstall the hardware, to prevent any potential back-ups from going into the walls again. Next, since obviously the clog seemed to be affecting the sink area as well as the tub, D turned to the sink for his next attempt to snake out the clog.

Back when we had a major clog in our basement utility sink, D bought a 25-foot plumbers' snake. It has certainly paid for itself (all $20 or something) in saved plumber costs and this time was no exception. D was able to snake almost the entire 25 feet from this spot and managed to pull out a wad of hair (I'll spare you the pictures of that one). He wasn't able to access it from the tub area but evidently this angle did the trick.

D has been saying for a year that he doesn't mind doing a little unclogging every few weeks, but I never liked that solution (and even included it on our honey-do list this past September). This time I convinced him that the old drain hardware wasn't working. For every few minor unclogs, there could be a major one as well. So we explored Home Depot and eventually came on the simplest solution:

We didn't go through the whole ordeal of putting in a stopper mechanism up at the overflow vent, but we were able to install the new grate without a screw by just enlarging the center hole and popping it on the existing bolt. So that makes it easy to pop off and replace with the original stopper (currently sitting on the little ledge in the upper left of the picture). And now most of my hair doesn't go down the drain and is easy to wipe away. Hopefully we can avoid such a dramatic clog for a while now.