This weekend was fun.

The downstairs toilet has had a leak for the longest time, but we have never bothered fixing it because the leak wasn’t that bad. We rarely used that toilet, and the leak was on the drain line anyway, so it almost never caused a problem.

Our upstairs shower drain has been slowly clogging for months. About a week ago, it had finally gotten so bad, that we decided that it was time to pour some Drano down the pipes. This worked like a charm; the clog seemed to be completely gone.

Little did we know, fixing our drain would give way to a managere of new problems.

Last Wednesday morning, after Monica and I had taken our showers, Monica went downstairs to discover that the laundry room was completely flooded. Since the laundry room is directly below the upstairs bathroom where we had showered, we assumed that the two circumstances were somehow connected. Monica thought that the water was coming from behind the back wall. I assumed my worse fears, that one of the pipes back there had a bad leak, and that we would have to rip the wall out to fix it. It didn’t matter though, we both had to go to work; all of this drama would have to wait.

When we got home that evening, the water was gone. The tile in our laundry room is all loose, and there’s nothing but concrete below it, which is just like a sponge. We have very little time in the evenings, so we resolved to be conservative with our upstairs water usage, and fix this problem on the weekend.

The next morning Monica flushed the upstair toilet and ran a little water in the sink. I happened to be downstairs near the toilet, and noticed that water was rapidly oozing from beneath it. What does this have to do with the laundry room, you ask? You might be surprised to know the answer. The downstairs toilet is not a bathroom; it’s just a toilet that sits off to the side in the laundry room. There is no privacy…there isn’t even a door on the laundry room!

So, I concluded the obvious. The downstairs toilet, as I said, has had a leak at the drain line ever since we moved there. So what does that have to do with the upstairs water? Nothing…unless that water can’t find a way out. In that case, it will find the lowest path of least resistance. And that’s why it found it’s way to that leak; because our septic tank was clogged.

So here’s the irony. Remember I said that fixing the upstairs drain would end up causing all kinds of new problems? Well, that’s not exactly true; but it certainly did reveal a bunch of problems that were already there. It’s not as if this sudden flood was caused by anything new. The fact that it had never happened before was because we never had such a tremendous flow from the upstairs bathroom. You see, that Drano didn’t unclog the bathtub drain; it unclogged the main drain that went from all the bathroom recepticles down to the main outlet. When it was clogged, it didn’t drain fast enough to overwhelm the lines below, which were also clogged. When we cleared them, the water from upstair came down as fast as we ran it, filling the lower pipes, also clogged, faster then they could drain, until the water level rose to the leak in the toilet…hence, the flood.

Initially, I assumed the septic tank was full and needed to be pumped. A friend of mine explained to me the concept of “field lines”, and that the only way that my tank could be full was if they were either clogged or busted.

Saturday, this friend of mine, Ricky, came over and ran a sewer tape down the line where my downstairs toilet was. He ran it about 40 feet out, and hit something hard, which we assumed was the back of the septic tank, or maybe the “90″ where the pipe went down into the tank.

Sunday, we dug the tank up and pulled the concrete lids off. That was a load of fun…it really was. We used pully systems and leverage and all kinds of physics to get those ton-and-plenty slabs off the top of that tank. (Wouldn’t it be funny if some kid discovered the lid to this thing as he was digging around, and thought it was burried treasure? Oh, the riches he would discover…)

We opened the tank to the smell of putrid death. There’s nothing like showing your friends the absolute worst side of you, and this rotting human excrement was as bad as it gets (physically speaking, that is). The tank wasn’t full; it was actually in pretty good shape. We ran the tape back up the same pipe, this time from the tank end. We didn’t get more that a foot and a half up it before we ran into something hard and concluded that it must be that same thing we ran into the day prior.

Our worst fears were about to be realized. What could be rock hard and stopping up the drain? Very few things, actually. Most likely a root that had busted through the thing. If that was the case, we would have to dig up the whole line and replace it.

Still, Ricky pounded the sewer tape again and again against whatever it was. My father-in-law and I went inside with a garden hose and connected it to the line for my washer, shoved the hose as far down the pipe as we could get it, and turned it on. If it wasn’t a root, the only other thing it could be is a bad clog, and the jet from the hose might help loosen it up.

These efforts were worthless. Almost before we got the water turned on, Ricky came running in. All his pounding had paid off; it was a clog afterall, and he had knocked it loose.

You wouldn’t believe the crap that came out of this clog (we’ve only lived there for 10 months, and some nasty lady lived there before us). Tapons, Q-tips, some kind of cheesy substance…even a hard plastic toilet paper roll with the freshness beads in the center (a lot of good those beads did…it still smelled like a permiscuous swine’s bootay [author’s note: I changed the way the last set of terms was phrased per my wife’s advice…she’s undoubtedly wiser than me, so I figured I better take heed ]).

Another hour and we had the concrete covers back on, and all was finished. Our plumbing worked perfectly once again, and I had spent nothing more than $10 and a little time.

My line of work is behind a computer. In fact, my whole life, most of my time was spent behind a c0mputer or at a desk with a pencil or a brush. I have very little savvy or instinct when it comes to manual labor. This event, however, I found surprisingly amusing. It was almost like a contact sport, using physics and brute strength to overcome massive rocks, solving logical sewer problems. I told Monica that I had never had so much fun wallowing in crap in all my life. (did I just say that? )