6/29/2007
So this week's drama of home ownership is the plumbing backing up. It is always lovely to go downstairs to see a couple of inches of water on the floor. It is even better to realize that it insn't rainwater or groundwater that has seeped in during a recent thunderstorm or localized flooding but that it has in fact come up out of the toilet.
I guess it is good that the basement is sort of only quasi finished. It is carpeted and does have wall partitions but it is really tacky and kinda needs to go away anyway. I mean there is only so much fake walnut paneling that one can have in their life before they reach a saturation level. It is sort of like lead poisioning. It won't kill you the first time you lick a wall. But you do it enough times and the lead can build up in your system over time and make you just a little slower. I'm pretty sure that fake wood paneling has the same detrimental effects.
Now the fact that the basement is sort of un-finished / poorly finished is a bit of a double edged sword in this latest adventure. On the one hand there is very little down there to get ruined by the overflow but on the other hand, being as there isn't much to do down in the basement I rarely go down there. This doesn't sound all that bad until I did go down there to discover the couple of inches of water in the corner of the basement and quickly came to the realization that I have no idea how long things have been ehrm... shitty down there. So the latter part of this week and this weekend I will be dividing my time between working on the sounds of summer events at Towson mucking out and drying out the basement. Then of course removing and bagging all the stuff that has been soaked and is starting to mold and mildew. Do you have any idea how many fun colors mold comes in? I didn't until this week.
For those that don't know, the drywall in your home is composed of basically a layer of compressed chalk or gypsum sandwiched between two layers of paper. None of this is particularly water resistant. In fact, it is kind of spelled out pretty clearly in the name "dry-wall" that it is, in fact, a product not really meant for damp or wet environments. As we alll learned in our high school science classes, water is the universal solvent. And nowhere is this really more apparent than when you soak a product called dry-wall in several inches of not very dry at all water (well more than just water but we won't get into that). Basically bad things happen and the drywall turns back into a mushy pile of it's base component parts. In other words, a pile of loose chalk and paper pulp.
Being mostly paper and chalk the drywall works as a fairly decent wick so any water around the base of the wall is quickly wicked up to help soak down and destroy and stain the rest of the wall, not just the bottom two inches that are actually submerged. In my case, thanks to not often venturing into the basement, it might have had a day or so of soaking time to thoroughly work it's way into the wallboard and now the bottom 2 ft or so of the walls in that corner of the basement are a crumbly mess. Oh, and not just a crumbly mess but a wet moldy, mildewed, crumbly mess. As luck would have it mold spores is one of the few things I'm alergic to so it has definitely been good times cleaning this all up.
I'm pretty sure I can remember, quite vividly actually, sitting down Tuesday night and thinking to myself. "Self, you know what would rock this weekend.... That's right mucking poo out of the basement, that would be frigging awesome. I wonder where I can go to do that. I'm not sure that's something that is bound to be found in the weekend section of the City Paper or an entry on Craig's list or anything. I doubt there are very many basement mucking venues out there. I'm sure there's some sort of weird coprophagous fetish associated with cleaning up plumbing disasters but I kind of doubt it has the popularity to have been turned into a commercial venture and is more likely to be the kind of thing practiced in the privacy of one's home. Or within the privacy of someone else's home who happens to be out of town and you broke in to practice your craft (as it were). Little did I know at the time but as fortune would have it I would not even need to venture outside of the house to fulfill this wildest of fantasies.
But that is all really besides the point that I now have several large 50 gallon trash bags full of what used to be the walls in the basement. And a couple more bags to fill this weekend with the carpeting that got soaked. OHHH, and guess what else isn't very waterproof at all. Bathroom vanities made out of low density fiberboard. Basically when they sit in a puddle of standing water guess what they turn back into. You got it, Elmer's glue and wood chips. So the bathroom vanity is now a couple of inches shorter and even more structurally unsound than it was when new.
So if a full bathroom has a toilet, a vanity, and a tub/shower and a half bath has a toilet and a vanity.... What do you call a room with just a toilet and no vanity? I'm thinking that my downstairs bathroom has either been "converted" into a Port-O-Pot or an outhouse. Since it isn't really portable, the former doesn't seem particularly accurate so I think I'm going to go with outhouse. Now I do realize that this is also not a very outdoor space either. But it does have a window to the outside. I guess I just need to get the jigsaw out and get a crescent moon carved in the door to make things complete.