I am a big fan of home repair. I’m not saying it’s easy. Hell, it’s often quite hard. There are plenty of times when you want to call a professional. Still, I like home repair a lot.
It’s one of the Tiers of Ownership that I believe in. A bit of control. A realization of what you have. Like cooking. Or posting your content to a resource that you have actual stakes in upkeeping.
This is a story about when home repair goes wrong.
On Easter Sunday, 5 April 2026, I was doing one of those gnarly-but-necessary tasks: cleaning out a deep fryer. I needed to refresh it because I was going to cook some vegan nuggets to go with our usual Sunday waffle meal.
I went into the water closet downstairs to wash my hands and a few seconds later noticed the sink was not draining. To clarify, it was draining but only if really full and only a small amount until it got about 1/3 full and then stopped.
We had some clogs upstairs in the shower and Kaz had worked on fixing those — later I realized the clogs are less like a traditional clog and possibly a mechanical aspect causing a bit of a vacuum/pressure problem but I have not solved that yet — and we were convinced that this new problem was somehow a child of the old problem. I tried plunging. We tried running water up to near the top of the sink to see if we could some pressure to release. Nothing was working.
Kaz unscrewed the screw holding in the drain guard. Let me illustrate with a picture.
The screw there in the middle. We wanted that out so that we could try and see what thing might be blocking the water flow. Past that part of the sink, you get this:
Something like a p-trap but not quite. I mean. We tried using a couple of tools to see if we could figure out where something was blocking the flow from the sink through this device.
Nothing was working.
We put a weak-but-potent-enough mixture in there to help break up clogs but had the problem that water simple wasn’t flowing enough. I would fill the sink up and let it slowly drain to the 1/3 mark. Did this on loop.
After maybe an hour or so, a time when I should have 100% been working on making Sunday dinner, there was no real progress.
Kaz had committed to running to a shop — few were open on Easter Sunday, as you can imagine — and while getting ready for that, I decided to reach under and feel around to try and figure out if there was supposed to be someway for us to access the piping system.
At that point, the whole under-pipe just fell completely out and dumped a sink full of water+chemicals all over me, the wall, the floor, and the tools we had been using.
Luckily, Kaz had not quite left yet and so I had helped wrangling cats and cleaning up a hell of a mess.
Turned out the pipe had a lot of soap-scum built up, along with the other bits such pipes accumulate, and they had somehow wedged into the section right as it goes into the wall.
I had no idea how I was able to effectively rip the pipe from the sink with barely a touch. Like finding out you have super-strength.
ONLY, you might have guessed it, but it was foreshadowed earlier on: turns out the screw that holds the drain-guard into place also holds the pipe in place. In fact, we had been massively lucky that it hadn’t dropped out earlier while we were waiting and possibly causing even more damage.
At any rate, we were able to take the pipe and get it completely cleaned out and get everything re-installed and cleaned up and working possibly better than has since we have moved in.
Never did make waffles, though. Sunday dinner ended up being cold cereal and sandwiches.
Did get the deep fryer cleaned. There’s that.
