It feels like much longer but I guess it was about a week ago, I had just finished running a load of laundry, and I found poop(?!) in the utility sink in the basement.  Since the washer drains into the utility sink, I assumed that there had somehow been poop in the dirty laundry.  I asked the kids who had pooped in their pants and Norah said that she had pooped during naptime at school.  I thought they had sent the poopie pants home and Ben had thrown them in the wash without emptying the poop out.  Mystery solved.

Then I mentioned the incident to Norah’s teacher, Maria, and she said Norah hadn’t had an accident.  Hmmm.  That night, Ben went to the basement and there was water on the floor in the front of the basement (the washer’s in the back).  While he was splashing around down there, I noticed that there was soap in the water and I surmised that the utility tub had overflowed when I ran a load of laundry, the water ran to the lowest point in the basement, and then the floor in the area of the washer had dried.  Some additional evidence was the fact that a couple of weeks before I had noticed that the utility sink was draining slower than usual and I had mentioned it to Ben.  He had used his “you’re over-reacting” tone and said that it was always like that.  I’ve learned that it does no good to argue with him, so I let it go.  When we found the water in the basement, he cleaned it up and again said not to worry about it.  WHATEVER!

The next night, after washing no more laundry, guess what?  More water in the basement!  Same exact situation…an inch of water in the lowest point of the basement, none around the washer, but it was wet under the laundry baskets.  We had all taken showers and baths that morning, and THAT water overflowed out of the utility sink.  NOW it’s getting serious because that means it’s not the sink drain that’s clogged, it’s the sewer line.  After making my case using a straw to demonstrate the fact that there was a clog somewhere down the line, Ben shunned my suggestion of calling Roto-Rooter and headed for Lowes.  He came back with a flimsy little 20′ pipe snake (pictured above), and a bottle of magic drain cleaner.  WHATEVER!

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At this point I think it was Sunday morning.  Our handy-guy (Orialis) was supposed to come that day and he knows everything about everything, so we decided we’d wait for him.  When he came at 5 p.m., I had escaped to the office, so Orialis, Ben, and the kids all piled into the Camry to go to Home Depot and rent a heavy-duty snake.  By the time I got home they had been at it for a couple of hours and determined that the 50′ snake wasn’t long enough.

Orialis came back at 5 p.m. today, they went to Home Depot again to get the 100′ snake, and finally reached the clog which was apparently some tree roots.  I will give Ben a lot of credit for spending 2 nights in the basement with Orialis, cleaning up all the water, and washing everything with bleach.  Now we have to figure out how to keep the tree roots out of our sewer line.  What’s next?

Actually, I can answer that.  What’s next is 4 dishwasher loads of dirty dishes (#3 is running right now), at least 12 loads of dirty laundry, and 3 filthy kids who will need baths before school tomorrow.  It should be a fun morning.
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