For a while now we’ve had an issue under the kitchen sink with water coming out of the air pipe, every time a lot of water goes down the sink or drains from the dishwasher. We’ve tried all the obvious things including checking that the pipes inside and outside of the house were clear and used a metal drain cleaner to poke down the overflow. No luck in finding any blockages, and the water still came out the air pipe.

Life then got busy and we left it. I put this self-made contraption under the sink to collect the water and emptied every now and again.

A few weeks later whilst pottering around the garden, I noticed that the kitchen drain outside was blocked and full. I stuck a pole down there and a mouse floated to the surface! I don’t think that was the reason why it was blocked, but it did put me off going anywhere near it or doing anything else for a while.

Life got busy again and to be honest it seems to have rained every day since. So, we were waiting for a dry day to work out what to do next instead of paying a lot of money for someone to come and look at it. In preparation, I ordered long rubber gloves from Amazon and some caustic soda. They are still sitting by the back door and we were still waiting for that dry day.

You can’t leave these things

Yesterday morning the kitchen didn’t smell very nice. I went outside to the recycling bins and it smelt even worse out there. The cupboard under the kitchen sink didn’t smell too good either. I decided to give in and called the experts, as I didn’t want to live with that smell all weekend and I didn’t want it to cause any other problems. Another storm was forecast so not the best weather conditions for us to be doing something that we have no experience in.

The results

A nice friendly man from the drain cleaning company came round first thing this morning and solved it in no time at all (5 minutes to be precise by using some sort of plunger on the end of a drain rod). It cost us £125!

Although it’s solved (and I’m very pleased), the lady on the phone yesterday didn’t tell me that it would cost more on a Saturday. Oh well, it’s done now and it resolved the issue under the sink as well. Dan the drain cleaning man spent the rest of the half an hour that he was here, making sure that no water came out into my self-made contraption under the sink.

He even gave us a few tips to prevent it happening again (including a trick with washing up liquid) and showed us some tools that we could buy to keep at the ready just we had to unblock the drain. I’m sure he wasn’t really supposed to do that, but I think he felt bad that we’d paid so much money for such a simple job. I did make him a cup of coffee as well.

So, that’s it for today apart from spending absolutely ages looking for something important around the house which I actually ended up finding in amongst a whole load of clutter that’s accumulated on the landing upstairs. Definitely one of the areas that I will be tackling tomorrow!

It’s now been two months

I’ve been making small improvements around the house for two months in a row now. Tomorrow I’ll also be posting a summary on how February’s decluttering has been going and how I’m feeling about it all.

Until then…

Sandra