When The Plumbing Failed
There was a massive pond of water gathered in the cabinet.
I glanced up at the drainage pipe leaving the sink and heading into the wall… it didn’t look pretty.
So I sighed and began to assess the plumbing issue.
Plumbing Is Always Worse Than It Initially Seems
Plumbing is one of those tricky things.
My father, a die-hard engineer no less, says it is his least favorite thing to have to fix in the house.
And while I have had my plumbing run-ins, this one took the cake.
I pulled out my pipe and crescent wrenches, turned off the water supply and went to work.
I figured it would take some doing to get the aluminum pipes apart. I got my specialized de-ruster solution out and started.
The pipes had obviously rusted through after years of use.
What I wasn’t expecting was they literally crumbled in my hands.
I’m not even sure how they were holding any water at all!
The worst pipe of all was the pipe going into the wall and heading out of the house.
You can see the condition of the pipe.
And because it was falling apart, I wasn’t sure how I was going to get it out of the wall.
This is where I started having heart palpitations and visions of finally having to give in and call the plumber.
But I wasn’t going to be defeated that easily.
I began to work the pipe to get it out… and the sucker crumbled and broke!
Holy moly I started to freak out inside.
When the pipe broke off, my heart started racing.
What on earth was I going to do?
I started to assess how bad the pipe was… what’s your assessment?
Yep, that’s the pipe that is so badly damaged that it broke off and is crumbling onto itself.
At this point, I should have been sweating bullets.
But instead, I was surprisingly cool.
So much so that I decided to take a mental break and snap a selfie.
I know, it may seem ridiculous to take a selfie.
But I needed a distraction for a minute and knew it would be pretty darn funny to see how calm I was.
I finally got that pipe out using needle nose pliers bit by bit, until the final pipe piece came out.
And after 2 days (I did take a break — a girl’s gotta walk away sometimes), I not only installed a new set of pipes leading from the sink, I even put in new faucet and handle hardware.
Take that!
Wow, it looks terrible… God forbid anyone to face this. By the way, pipe destruction may be caused by too frequent use of store-bought chemical drain cleaners. Even though they may work, you can do more harm than good when you use them very often.