Sometimes it rains inside

If you read the last post about Mother’s Day, you might have seen my mom’s comment about their unfortunate end to a lovely day. She wrote,
“Just before we went to bed, we checked on a leak we had under the kitchen sink. Our collector thing for the leaking water had filled up and spilled over and gone through the floor and leaked onto one of the beds downstairs. We had to shut off all the water last night and get a plumber in today to fix things. Not exactly the greatest ending to Mother’s Day.”

Ugh.

So, they had a plumber come and take care of some things, and hopefully it’s all fixed up.

Well, today, we had our own bit of plumbing emergency. My daughter called me on my cell phone while I was waiting for my other daughter to finish up her softball practice, and said, “Mom, you know that light in the kitchen? Well, it’s filled up with water and dripping on the floor.” What? I indeed freaked out a bit. I asked her to run up and see what’s leaking upstairs. The laundry room? The bathroom? Turns out the kids’ bathroom toilet, which was clogged, was overflowing and leaking through the floor, filling up this light, and then dripping onto the floor in the kitchen. “What should we do?” she asked. Since I was at least 15 minutes away, I told her to call Dad and ask him what to do, and I would hurry home as quick as I could. I grabbed the girls and sped home. I called back to tell them to turn off the toilet–there’s a little handle in the back, and Cole told me he had already done that.

Arrrg!

John told me when he had clogged the toilet, I tried to plunge it, but couldn’t, and I just left it. I forgot that this is also the toilet that needs a new valve or something and it continues to run even when it’s not being flushed. That filled up the toilet, spilling out onto the floor, thus flooding through the ceiling and into this light fixture. I purposely did NOT take a picture to show you all, because–ick.

When I got home, I ran in, and the kids had things pretty much under control by then. I had told them on the phone to throw towels down in both the kitchen and the bathroom, and they did that. After that, there wasn’t a whole lot they could do. I ran upstairs to try to plunge that STUPID toilet (you may recall that I recently called the plumber to unclog that toilet, and after about 2 minutes of work, they charged me a very unholy amount. I had a ’30 day guarantee’, but that was on March 22, and that’s been more than 30 days. BLERG!), but it was unplungeable. I couldn’t budge it. And what good will it do to mop the floor if the toilet situation isn’t taken care of?

Ryan soon came home, and he tried the plunger, too. He even went to Ace hardware and bought a new and improved plunger (he’s long complained that none of our plungers do the job, and I guess I have to agree with him), but even he can’t get that blankety-blank toilet clog cleared. He unhooked the light and dumped out all toilet water that had collected in it, cleaned it, and put it back up. I hope that it was a direct shot from the potty to that light and there isn’t a bunch of water waiting to turn our ceiling to mold.

So–what do we do, internets? Do I pay another plumber to come and snake that stupid toilet? Will my capable friend Janice, who claims she has superior snaking skills, come and rescue me? Perhaps we’ll replace that old crapper with a better toilet, I don’t know.

But yes, folks, sometimes it rains inside. And to my sister, who was also with us at my mom’s house on Sunday night, I say–watch out for your flood, because perhaps it’s going to hit us all.