Plumbing 101

Recently the sinks in my bathroom have been very slow draining. This has happened in the past and usually I just buy drano and be done with it. With a house full of girls the sinks are always clogged. Seth has been working for a plumbing company for a couple of years now and I remembered that he had said how bad drano is for your pipes and that usually it was not that hard of a fix and using chemicals did not always take care of the whole problem. So late Saturday night I called him and asked him how to take apart the sink so I could get the drain stopper out. He was so cute - he explained step by step what I should see and what to do when I got under the sink. I emptied the cupboard and began my operation. It was just as he had described and I found the "p" trap (which by the way should be called "u" trap it looks nothing like a "p") unscrewed the nut thingys, unscrewed the nut thingy that holds the stopper and can I say I have never been so disgusted as when I pulled out the grossest thing I have ever seen. It was the size of a small rat (hair and other junk) - YUK! Once I was over the shock of what I had found and disposed of it immediately I put the whole thing back together - all the thingys screwed back in place. I tested it to make sure nothing leaked and lo and behold I had just completed my first official plumbing job! And all in about 15 minutes! I was so excited about what I had just done that I did David's sink as well. (I won't even describe what I pulled out from his sink - YUK!) When he came upstairs he was so surprised - usually these tasks are his responsibility and I never mess with it. Thanks to Seth's help and the fact that plumbing runs in my genes (my dad was a plumber when I was a little girl) I have clean flowing pipes again!