In the span of just over a week, the problem that the water from the washing machine overflows back up into the floor of the laundry room is no more. Completely gone. Kaput.
Solving the problem actually started more than a week ago, and it actually started when the problem got worse. One day after dinner Mother told me that the water back-up got into an adjacent room, the furnace room. Saw the huge puddle that seemed to seep under these wood blocks upon which lay a bunch of knickknacks my parents hoard -- papers, old VHS tapes of kung-fun movies, tools, etc. It was everywhere, and despite trying to clean it up, I looked at this as the worsening of a problem I couldn't solve when it was relatively small. I really was going to fight Mother (and, really, Father, because he was going to have to know about this) that we would have to call for someone to check this out.
Naturally, Mother ran to the sage advice of My Fucking Father, who told us to use that snake thing I tried to use to no success over the winter. Mother, Buddha bless her, thought that we could try later that night, together. That convinced me to give it one more try. However, when I moved the snake to the laundry room, she told me to move it back to where I found it -- in the furnace room, where this supposed new leak was. She had no experience of trying to drain the back-up, but she knew that the snake wasn't supposed to go down the spillover drain in the laundry room. In fact, there is a tributary pipe in the furnace room where you're supposed to dip the snake into. Mother has seen Father do that a lot, I guess.
Well, I stand corrected. I'll try anything different, and if what I tried was flat-out wrong, well, maybe this wasn't going to be so bad after all.
She did the heavy lifting. Mother fed the snake down the pipe. I just plugged the contraption in and stepped on the pedal that gave the snake the twisting motion to punch through any back-up as Mother pushed it further into the pipe. And that is exactly what happened: At some point, the snake punched through something, and Mother heard a gurgling noise indicating the standing water in this tributary pipe was quickly shooting through the standpipe, out of the house and away from any potential chance it would cause trouble for us. I didn't hear it -- that is how little attention I paid to this job because, really, Mother had it handled.
"How do you know that solved the problem?" I asked Mother.
"I know," she replied.
And you know what? I haven't had a problem since. I've done two loads of laundry, both of them big piles because Mother wanted to throw some of her dirty clothes in with mine, and there has not been any huge back-up of water ever since. Not even close. And that is a huge relief, knowing that the key was to push the snake down the right pipe. Not only is the problem gone for now, if it ever comes back, I think I know what to do from now on.
Moreover, I think I have solved the other back-up problem, the one from the sink down into the pipe. There are two partitions for our sink. And one of them (the one the drain pipe from the washing machine shoots its waste water into) always seems to drain slower, a lot slower, than the other one. Well of course the sink partition that the water lands into is the one that drains slowly.
But I realized there was an obvious reason for that -- the strainers for each sink partition. There is always lint that is injected out along with the waste water. That ultimately gets caught by the strainer, but that blocks the water from draining, so it drains slower. I continually have to reach my hand in to scrape out the link so it'll drain. But even though I theorize that link gets stuck in both strainers, the one on the right (the one the washer pipe shoots its water over to get to the other one) somehow still drains faster. Don't know why, but I figured tonight was the time to just switch the strainers. (I know I switched the strainers before, when I bought a new one for the right one.)
Well, even though I couldn't tell if any waste water spilled into the right one, the one now with the "bad" strainer, I went back downstairs just late tonight (I had planned on doing the laundry earlier in the evening, but I fell asleep trying to watch the Minnesota United match and then just waited till after Saturday Night Live) and saw that the standing water level in the left partition, the one with the "good" strainer, was low and noticeably draining water at a reasonable rate. I did scrape the strainer for lint, but luckily, the fast-moving water did not back up through the laundry room floor (like it did the last time) because Mother and I cleared up any clog in the furnace room.
So now that the clog in the pipe is fixed and the clog in the tub is OK-to-better-than-OK ... well, everything is hunky-dory!
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