Down the Tubes

Warning: This post contains poop. A lot of it. It is also rated PG-13 for edited cussing.

I haven't blogged about this yet, because, quite frankly, I didn't find it amusing. At all.
In fact, it's still not all that amusing, but it IS resolved, so now I'll tell you about it. I guess.
On Monday night/Tuesday morning, at 2am, our plumbing STOPPED. Just stopped working. The basement flooded and nothing would drain. There were carrot peels, onion paper and hamburger grease floating in the sink in the basement. Bad, bad, badbadbad, right? So bad, in fact, that for a very tense hour or so, we didn't know if the toilet was draining into the basement sink or out different pipes. Thankfully, we determined that the toilet uses the BLACK pipe, which was not draining into the basement--on Monday, anyway.
On Tuesday during the day, things seemed pretty normal, but slow. The shower drained slowly, as did the kitchen sink and basement basin. I even did a load of laundry and ran the dishwasher.
The plan was that Jared (who was a plumber for a year) would come over and try to help...but then Jared had a baby. Sigh. I mean, not that I hold little Jazlyn responsible or anything...
So...we lived with the slow plumbing until Thursday night. We took four-minute showers, ate out or let the dishes pile up and did not do any laundry.
(Sidebar--any idea how fun it is to get in the shower, turn on the water enough to get wet, turn off the water, soap up, turn the water back on and rinse off? Yeah, not fun at all. AT. ALL.)
On Thursday night at 1am when the toilet overflowed and Rich and I were standing in POOPWATER, I finally said, "We can't live this way anymore! We have to call a plumber, even if we have to put it on the credit card. This is turning into an emergency!" I very seriously considered coming to one of your houses at 1am with my baby and crying myself to sleep on your couch. I tried to figure out whose house I could get into without waking anyone up. Kristi was in the lead, followed closely by my in-laws. But...as we all know, Kristi doesn't lock her doors.
I digress.
So...Friday morning, Rich called Roto-Rooter. They said they'd be out to our house between 12 and 2pm that day to do an estimate. At 11am, Rich and I went downstairs to move stuff around to let the plumber do his job, and discovered another joint in the BLACK pipes that we didn't know existed. Richard said, "Let's see if I can snake it myself before he gets here!"
Less than 15 minutes later, we were once again standing in poopwater. That's TWICE in under twelve hours that I stood in poopwater, for those of you keeping track.
From there, we quickly determined that we couldn't do anything and had to just wait in the poopwatery basement for the plumber. That's when SJ and I left to go to Lakeville (so f***youverymuch, Anonymous for saying I did my part to help ruin America. How much worse could it possibly get when MY OWN BASEMENT is filled with POOPWATER!?!? A word of advice? Never judge a woman before standing in her POOPWATER shoes!).
Here's the thing. Richard and I don't have any money. Any. We were SO worried about this. We didn't know how we would afford to solve a huge plumbing problem, and that's certainly what this looked like it was shaping up to be. We prayed every night that God would either just make the problem go away, or make it affordable for us.
The plumber arrived at about 12:30pm and left at 5pm. He used an electric auger/snake and snaked our main drains all the way to the street (over 100 feet). He worked incredibly hard for over four hours AND CLEANED UP AFTER HIMSELF. Guess how much it cost. Just guess.
$283.
And he sold Richard the parts he needed to repair the pipes out of the back of his truck FOR CASH.
God is SO good. He answered our prayer to the letter. That $283 is an expense for which we didn't plan, but it is SO much more doable than what we were expecting.
And now?
Now I take 20 minute showers and flush the toilet without fear.
Also, my whole house is disinfected because of the poopwater clean-up. I guess there's a silver lining in every poopwater rain cloud.