Joe the Plumber

Here's a little anecdote about home ownership, a true story that happened to us a few nights ago.

I was cooking dinner and throwing the food waste into the sink with the disposal as I was going. I had thrown some remains of an onion in the disposal earlier, and then later washed off a fresh head of lettuce and ripped off the outer leaves. I pushed all the scraps down the drain, turned the water on and then flipped the switch for the disposal. I knew the disposal was on because I could hear it running but it didn't look like it was breaking anything up. The water that was running was not going down the drain, but slowly filling up in the sink. I turned the disposal off to let the water drain for a minute. When I turned it back on, the disposal sprayed green-lettuce-pulp-water up out of the sink and lightly misted the kitchen. I yelled "OH LORD!" and Andrew yelled from the family room, "ARE YOU OK?" He hadn't been paying attention to what was going on and I guess he thought I was hurt. He came over to asses the situation while I wiped down the fridge, counter, floor, and other surfaces where the green-lettuce-pulp-water had landed. We decided to hold a large plastic mixing bowl a little above the drain so water could still get down but spray would not come out. After a few rounds of trying that, the sink was full of green-lettuce-pulp-water and nothing was going down. All I could think to say to Andrew was, "Welcome to home ownership!" and we both laughed. At this point I considered taking a picture because I was already thinking the situation would make for great blog fodder, but I decided I'd spare you all the view of the green pulp. Although it was pretty humorous, I started wondering what we were going to do to fix the problem. We know a good electrician but we don't have a plumber (where is Joe when you need him?), we certainly didn't know how to fix a garbage disposal ourselves, and for the first time in our adult lives, we didn't have a landlord we could call. It was up to us to fix this, and most likely would have to shell out a lot of cash in the process. This was the first major "malfunction" we encountered since owning the house, other than ones we created ourselves during various improvement projects. I started to get nervous.


Luckily, Andrew remembered we had an unopened bottle of liquid plumber so we poured most of that down the sink and let it sit for a few minutes. The next time we turned the disposal on everything went down just fine and the water drained. Crisis averted. No phone call to Joe.

Welcome to home ownership.