Going down the toilet...
Jul. 21st, 2010 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jim_pToday at the frame shop literally went down the toilet.
The plumbing in my shop has been showing signs of "issues" for a while. Occasionally a strange odor would waft up in the back half of the shop, where the bathrooms are. Typically, the odor would go away by the time I could call the landlord to take a look at it...
More recently, the one toilet that we use has been acting a teeny bit wonky. Sometimes I'd come in in the morning and there'd be almost no water in the bowl. Sometimes it would flush kinda slowly, but a little persuasion from Mr. Plunger would fix that.
Yesterday I got a call from my sous-chef complaining that the toilet wasn't flushing *and* the plunger wasn't helping. Great. It was late in the day, so I called Rooter-Man and made an appointment for this morning.
Of course, as these things always go, first thing in the morning everything is working fine. The guy flushes about 20 times, and it goes down just fine every time. He's convinced that the problem is that the tank isn't quite filling enough, which means there's not quite enough "head" for the flush water. I try to tell him, "Look, that wouldn't explain why plunging doesn't help". He's just about to give up when he asks about the *second* half-bath that's just off the moulding room. The one that we don't use, because it's been turned into storage. With much effort we clamber over boxes and mouldings and he gives it a flush... "Uh-oh, the water is rising!" When it finally *does* go down, the other toilet starts bubbling. Obviously Something Is Up.
He says he'll go off on another job, leaving me time to clear out that half-bath so he can work on it. I stuff my car with boxes and shove the rest into the cutting room so he can do his work.
To make a long story VERY short, this building is so old that nobody quite knows how the plumbing goes together. The reason that the problem was so pronounced in my second half-bath is that it's literally at the end of the line... obviously, it's the closest to the blockage. If things were to continue as they had been, eventually we'd be swimming and none of the upstairs businesses would even have noticed.
This guy was able to snake out about 75 feet and still wasn't able to get to the sewer main. He did, however, bring up chunks of grease (and there are two restaurants in this building). At the end of the day he still wasn't able to unclog it.
Since the landlord bought this building expecting to demolish it and build something else, he isn't exactly curious about the building systems. He leaves it up to me to take care of things. This time, though, he's getting a bill.
As of this moment we have an awful stench in the back room and no working toilets. I had to block off the back room with plastic so it wouldn't get into the rest of the shop any more than it already has. Tomorrow we regroup; Rooter-Man will come with his boss and the camera-snake, and I'm going to call the town to find out where the building sewer connections are.
This consumed pretty much all my energy today and shot our productivity to hell. We can't build frames until this is fixed and I can re-organize the cutting room. We can still do matting and assembly for jobs in the pipeline, but we need this fixed FAST!
It was a hot day, I was sweating bullets, and constantly drinking water. Good thing the house is just a couple blocks from the shop...
The plumbing in my shop has been showing signs of "issues" for a while. Occasionally a strange odor would waft up in the back half of the shop, where the bathrooms are. Typically, the odor would go away by the time I could call the landlord to take a look at it...
More recently, the one toilet that we use has been acting a teeny bit wonky. Sometimes I'd come in in the morning and there'd be almost no water in the bowl. Sometimes it would flush kinda slowly, but a little persuasion from Mr. Plunger would fix that.
Yesterday I got a call from my sous-chef complaining that the toilet wasn't flushing *and* the plunger wasn't helping. Great. It was late in the day, so I called Rooter-Man and made an appointment for this morning.
Of course, as these things always go, first thing in the morning everything is working fine. The guy flushes about 20 times, and it goes down just fine every time. He's convinced that the problem is that the tank isn't quite filling enough, which means there's not quite enough "head" for the flush water. I try to tell him, "Look, that wouldn't explain why plunging doesn't help". He's just about to give up when he asks about the *second* half-bath that's just off the moulding room. The one that we don't use, because it's been turned into storage. With much effort we clamber over boxes and mouldings and he gives it a flush... "Uh-oh, the water is rising!" When it finally *does* go down, the other toilet starts bubbling. Obviously Something Is Up.
He says he'll go off on another job, leaving me time to clear out that half-bath so he can work on it. I stuff my car with boxes and shove the rest into the cutting room so he can do his work.
To make a long story VERY short, this building is so old that nobody quite knows how the plumbing goes together. The reason that the problem was so pronounced in my second half-bath is that it's literally at the end of the line... obviously, it's the closest to the blockage. If things were to continue as they had been, eventually we'd be swimming and none of the upstairs businesses would even have noticed.
This guy was able to snake out about 75 feet and still wasn't able to get to the sewer main. He did, however, bring up chunks of grease (and there are two restaurants in this building). At the end of the day he still wasn't able to unclog it.
Since the landlord bought this building expecting to demolish it and build something else, he isn't exactly curious about the building systems. He leaves it up to me to take care of things. This time, though, he's getting a bill.
As of this moment we have an awful stench in the back room and no working toilets. I had to block off the back room with plastic so it wouldn't get into the rest of the shop any more than it already has. Tomorrow we regroup; Rooter-Man will come with his boss and the camera-snake, and I'm going to call the town to find out where the building sewer connections are.
This consumed pretty much all my energy today and shot our productivity to hell. We can't build frames until this is fixed and I can re-organize the cutting room. We can still do matting and assembly for jobs in the pipeline, but we need this fixed FAST!
It was a hot day, I was sweating bullets, and constantly drinking water. Good thing the house is just a couple blocks from the shop...
