Our Drain-O crisis
by Christine M. Yantis Hargrove

When we moved into our first home after living in an apartment, we didn’t live there a week before we had our first homeowner crisis. The water in the sink wouldn’t go down the drain, and I was convinced it was a clog. I spent the entire afternoon working on it, pouring Drain-O down it, trying to wiggle the trap off the rest of the pipes (it was glued, so it wouldn’t wiggle free, despite my efforts), and cursing the sink. I called my husband, I called my dad, I googled the problem, I tried everything!

When my husband got home, he drilled holes in the PVC pipe to see which pipe we needed to replace. Only after we found absolutely NO clogs did we stop to think…and when my husband went to the garage underneath to see if the clog could be in the pipes underneath the kitchen, he saw that the garage door had been left open (in February!) for a week and the pipes had frozen!

We closed the garage door and went to Lowe’s to inquire if there was a product that would cover small holes in PVC pipes. The employees who worked there gave us strange looks when we admitted that we drilled the holes ourselves, and we didn’t care to elaborate. We bought some epoxy, fixed the pipes, and waited for the pipes in the garage to unfreeze. We realized we were very lucky that the pipes didn’t burst!

We came through the crisis tired but set back only five dollars, and we have learned the valuable lesson to check the garage before drilling into pipes!!!