Drain Pain

Oh the joys of home ownership! Even though we had our laundry room drain snaked just a few short months ago, over the past month it had began to back up again. Our go-to plumber has never been able to give us an explanation as to why this drain always spews out garbage disposal waste from the kitchen drain above, and always classified them as separate issues. While this might be true in some extent, when this drain is backing up, the water is always coming from the kitchen line.

With the emergency fund depleted from the "urgent" bathroom redo, our hope rested on the right tool, a rented power snake auger from the (not so nearby) big box hardware store, and we sought to remedy the clog ourselves over the weekend. Unfortunately, despite funneling the twisting coil into our drain for several hours, we were unsuccessful in clearing the line. Inadvertently, things got a little worse when the auger drill bit disconnected from the line and became trapped in our pipe. Our blind attempts at retrieving the bit failed, though we were able to bring up several broken bits from much smaller (probably manual) snake lines that had broken in our pipe some time (before us) in the past. In addition, most ominously, we hit on what seemed to be a deep amount of what we think is marine clay. This entire area sits atop marine clay, which expands and contracts as the ground becomes saturated or dries. Not Biblically inspired, our founding father's selected a swamp upon which to build their capital city, and of course the surrounding area is much the same consistency.

While the auger rental cost us a little under $100, our DYI efforts aren't going to fix this, and neither is our go-to plumber. Tomorrow a drain specialist is set to come scope the drain with a camera and I hope it's not as bad as I suspect.

Incidentally, today we met with a lawyer to see where we stand with the surprise invoice the bathroom contractor sent several weeks after the "final invoice" was sent, and my "paid in full" check was cashed. They claim they screwed up the invoice (the original appeared accurate and was as expected and the second was very questionable) and are claiming we now owe them over $1,300 more. Not surprisingly, they've recently run afoul with Angie's List and this once A rated business has all of a sudden been stripped of their search engine and advertising privileges. While I've yet to place any feedback from our transaction, my guess is I'm not the only one who is currently having issues with this company. It's rather unfortunate too, because we have so much more work to be done in our home and I had hoped this would be our go-to company for some of the other things we need to have done in our home, but that notion is gone. I just pray this can be settled justly.