A visit from the plumber

I ended up calling Darren from Regional Drain, on the recommendation of one of my blog readers (thank you GA!). Darren had a plumber at my door in twenty minutes. His name was Bruce and he was a soft-spoken, twinkly-eyed man with a very long black ponytail. He stepped inside, dropped to one knee and introduced himself to Duncan, who thought he was wonderful. Then he stood up and introduced himself to me, and I introduced him to the blocked sink.

Bruce busied himself with the sink and Duncan lay down beside him to watch while I retreated upstairs to surf the net. Before long, the sink was fixed and the duct-taped trap was replaced.

“All done,” said Bruce.

“What was the problem?” I asked. Secretly I suspected there was a dead mouse in my plumbing.

“There was a lot of grease in there,” he said.

I must have looked a bit guilty because he smiled gently and told me that it’s a very common problem and that he used to put grease in the sink too, back when he was a carpenter. But now that he’s a plumber he doesn’t do that anymore.

I thought he was very sweet about it. I guess I think of plumbers as authority figures when it comes to plumbing, and maybe I expected him to give me hell for screwing up the sink. I KNOW that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Let’s just attribute it to my mom’s authoritarian parenting style and leave it at that. (Sorry Mom.)

Since he was being so nice about things, I asked Bruce to take a look at my toilet too – it’s kind of a crappy flusher. He lifted the tank lid and pushed the hose thing into the tube thing, and that was that. We talked about billing arrangements (the rate was very reasonable, I thought – $60/hour plus a $10 fuel surcharge), and then we talked about animal rescues. After he left I set about putting my kitchen in order.

I had to scour the sink and wash practically every dish in the house. But first I thought I’d dump the pail of dirty water Jamie had scooped out of the sink on Sunday. I didn’t want to dump it into the newly fixed kitchen sink, so I took it down to the basement and dumped it into the laundry sink. This is where the washing machine empties into. I dumped it and it all poured out onto the floor. It seems there’s a big fat leak in the plumbing under the sink. It’s not a huge deal since it just flows into a drain in the basement floor a couple of feet away, but if I’d known about it 20 minutes earlier, I could have gotten the plumber to fix it.

Anyway. I’m very pleased to have my kitchen back in commission. I celebrated with filet mignon, summer pea salad and red wine. Thanks to all of you who recommended your plumbers to me. If you ever need a plumber, I highly recommend Bruce via Darren at Regional Drain. Kat and Grace’s plumber Marcel at Cundall’s Plumbing sounds good too: “a neat freak and a prince!”