Homeownership: Yay!

Oh wait. Did I say, "Yay!" I meant, "Holy crap."

A few weeks ago the shower in the master bathroom started draining so slowly that I was afraid it would overflow during a normal length shower. Figuring there was a clump of hair stuck in the pipe, The Husband and I headed over to the local home improvement big box store and acquired some drain cleaner and a hand crank snake thingy.

A big dose of caustic chemicals did not clear the clog, so I stuck the snake thingy down the drain to no avail. The Husband also applied the snake thingy in such a manly fashion that it became firmly lodged in the still-clogged pipe.

So, out comes the plumber to remove the snake thingy and climb up on the roof to thoroughly clean the pipes. He pulled out a bunch of roots and proclaimed the job complete. And, he seemed to be correct for at least a few days. However, the shower started backing up again and was ever so awesomely joined by the toilet.

Once again the plumber calls on our humble abode. He proceeds to install a street level access pipe, so he can poke a little camera down into our plumbing to see what the issue is without stomping around on the roof. It turns out that the contractor who redid the bathroom sometime before we bought the house crammed a bunch of tiles into the pipes.

How? Why? The mystery boggles the mind. Surely it would have been about 1000 times easier to throw this rejected tile into a trash can than to wedge it into the pipes. I can only speculate what the previous homeowners did to this contractor to cause him to wreak such weird revenge on their innocent plumbing.