Trying not to flood the zone

plumbing the depths of my abilities

My kids have a bathroom that they share, creating the opportunity for drains to be clogged by stickers, brace elastics, one of those little plastic ducks I find everywhere, and other assorted plagues. It makes perfect sense that the sink would give up its draining abilities.

I’m not a plumber. But there are handy people in my family, so I know there are capable genes somewhere in my double helixes. I respect the hard work. I’m not afraid to try.

So I rolled up my sleeves.

The the drain plug was pushed down way too far by one of the kids and ended up stuck. It’s a push pop-up drain, the kind that you press down on and it clicks into place, and you press again to release it. Which I kept calling “a push-pop drain,” flooding the zone with images of this:

Look at the cocky look on that red one’s face. Also, is the blue one dead??

The drain was not releasing. So my husband removed the PVC pipe beneath the sink, a bucket there to catch the chaos, and I determinedly told him I would take it from there.

After watching several YouTube videos about how to remove a push-pop from the drain, I used pliers to get the drain assembly loose and felt quite fancy that I got it out. Arrogantly, I drove to the hardware store with the drain in a flowered reusable bag in my purse, confident that the store employees would think I was there for plants but I was there for PLUMBING SUPPLIES. All caps.

I had to wander for a few minutes, finding the right aisle, but once I was in the Plumbing Supplies section, I pulled the push-pop from my purse and scrutinized the shelves for a replacement part.

One of the store employees walked over.

“Looking for something in particular?” He was definitely from the 1900s, like I am, but had a few extra decades on me. He had a Gandalf way about him, minus the beard. And the wizard hat.

“Yeah, I have a sink drain that is busted so I need a replacement. I brought the drain with me,” I replied, holding up the flowery bag, the sludge-covered drain assembly trapped inside.

“Great. Well you need the whole thing, not just the pop-up drain plug,” he said, reaching up to grab a few boxes from the shelf. Shit, I have to replace the whole tube thing? Sweat collected on my lower back. The sink was in pieces at home. I needed to make this happen or I’d have to call A Real Plumber.

“This is what you need,” he said, showing me two options. “Both are updated versions of what you have, and both will fit your current set-up.”

“Okay. I can do that. I’ve never done this before, though. This isn’t in my skillset yet.”

He lowered his chin, looking over his square glasses at me, brow furrowed into rows of face crops. “What do you do for work?”

“I’m a writer,” I said. “But I’m good at figuring shit out.”

His shrubby eyebrows came together again, assessing. Then he handed me one of the boxes like it was a sword he had just pulled from the stone. “Then let’s figure this out. And then you can write about it.”

He walked me through what I needed to do. I bought the assemblies. (And one teeny Christmas cactus.) And then ventured back to my workspace.

Several things I wasn’t prepared for:

• What fell into the bucket. It smelled like an old, abandoned aquarium. There will be no more descriptions or I will die from recall.

• Plumber’s putty. It’s not silly, like the putty I’m accustomed to. It’s tacky and grainy, it smells like pencil shavings, and rolling it into a little worm to smush around the drain was kind of fun. But now I have two whole tubs of it because I bought a two pack for no reason.

• Related: If you need plumber’s putty, hit me up.

• Also related: The putty has to “set” overnight, so I was doing this at 8.30 pm while one kid did homework and the other kid asked me repeatedly what I was doing.

• Related to the also related part: I didn’t all the way know what I was doing, but I was learning. A lot.

• Reassembling the PVC pipe. I should have taken a picture of the layout before we disconnected it. The sink drain and the wall connection point are not a direct path, so there were three different pieces of pipe that needed to be perfectly twisted in order to puzzle-box connect. I starred in a film montage of sitting on the bathmat with the (rinsed clean) sections of pipe, rearranging them and then looking at the sink assembly through my glasses, then pushing the glasses up on my forehead to look back at the pipe while Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger played over the montage footage.

• The do-and-redo portion of putting everything back together. I didn’t get the threading and the pipes aligned at first, or at second, or at … third. We didn’t have the right size wrench so I had to use one that’s wonky-sized. It took several tries.

• It’s taking. Taking several tries. … I’m currently on my fourth try.

• I now have even more respect for people who can fix things without Googling. Or swearing.

At present, the sink hovers at “almost fixed” status because I have to tighten it again and then put the PVC back together and then run the water to make sure it all stays where it belongs. So close!

Photo by Samuel Ramos on Unsplash

But I have dreams. Fantasies, really, of going back to the hardware store and finding Gandalf. He’ll see me approaching and take notice, dropping whatever hardware item he’s holding and raise his ancient eyebrows.

“I did it,” I’ll say.

Brightly colored confetti will rain down from the sky as I continue walking past him, a brief high-five of celebration and a knowing grin shared between us, and he’ll tip his hat (he has that wizard hat now).

“She’s a writer,” he’ll say to the flummoxed customer next to him, his voice breaking with pride as he adds, “and she’s a plumber, damn it.”

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