Bread and Plumbing: Part Four

 

The Deluge

My regular readers may recall that I have mentioned, on occasion, the fact that I hate plumbing. Being proficient in plumbing is an entirely separate level of skill, artistic talent and pluck, beyond any other labor practice. Carpentry, for instance, involves structural engineering, careful measurement and the understanding of thousands of guidelines in order to craft a product that will be safe and long-lasting. But there is room for error with carpentry: your measurements can be off by a few eighths of an inch, your cross beams not quite level and your posts not quite plumb, and yet your structure will still stand strong. The same could be said for electrical work, landscaping and painting. Failures in these areas tend to present themselves by degree of noticeability: if the mistake doesn’t make an impact to form or function, then it’s probably okay to let it go.

Not so with plumbing. If you make a plumbing mistake, you get a leak. And even minor, slow leaks will eventually cause damage and loss.

I’ve never completed a plumbing project without having to redo a leaky joint. Never.

Which is why I rely exclusively on professionals to do the job for me at this stage in my life.

Thus, for this project, I contacted Angie’s List to get a “Top Pro” to come out. We’d had luck with Angie’s List before, and figured we’d luck out again. Because they’ll send a “Top Pro.”

Note that Angie’s List uses the word “Pro” because it implies “Professional”. The strict definition of the term “Professional” means “A person who does the indicated work to earn his/her living”. It is very important that they say “Pro” and not “Professional” for reasons we shall now explore.

A few days after I put in the work request, a guy pulled up to our house in a well-seasoned 1982 Chevette. I was not home at the time but was monitoring the security cameras while my wife ushered him in to explain the job.

I squinted into my phone and pinch-zoomed the image to get a better look at this character. My first red flag was raised immediately: Not wearing coveralls. Shouldn’t a worthy plumber be wearing coveralls?

This fellow looked like he might have only recently arrived in town after sleeping in a box car.  

So let’s assess: no coveralls, no clipboard, no hat, no van with a ladder and a logo. I was already not impressed by this “Top Pro”, but willing to give him a chance. After all, we were taught not to judge a book by its cover, right?

Just the same, I was also on high alert, ready to dash home on a moment’s notice.

I did not hear the verbal exchange as my wife explained the situation and the details of the request, but her gesticulations and his head nodding and thoughtful expressions gave me some confidence that the job was understood and the plan for implementation was being crafted.

He crouched down to look at the wall behind the range and made some marks. Then he stood up to announce that he would need to make a trip to Home Depot to get some pipe, fittings and pipe cement.

While he was away, my wife texted me the details of the conversation, and her concern from his lack of questions. She had handed him my sketches and hand-written suggestions along with a few pages from the new range’s installation instructions. I believed he was well-armed and ready to tackle the installation of a new water line, so our soon-to-be-arriving range could make delicious, crusty baguettes.

With renewed confidence, I closed the monitoring app, put my phone down and went back to work.

An hour or so later, my wife called me. She never calls me at work.

“I’m hearing scary sounds under the house,” she said. “Like something is very wrong.”

“I’m sure it’s normal, and will settle down once he’s done.”

“I hope so… it sounds like water gushing out of the vents.” She sounded truly panic stricken.

I told my boss I needed to head home to take care of a contractor emergency, and I’d log in from there to complete the day.

I arrived at home to witness our “Top Pro” emerge from under the house, pants soaking wet, to tell me he’ll need to get more glue. More glue?

“Yeah,” he grunted, “I guess it needs to dry some more before I turn on the water main.” I looked at what he was holding: PVC cement and purple primer. I’ve used both before and had very good luck with it. It’s fast and strong, and shouldn’t take but a couple of minutes to set. I wanted to correct his use of the term “dry” though, because anything that dries can get wet again. Glues and cements need to set or cure, and it has very little to do with “drying” per se. But semantics.

So he headed out the door and back to home depot to get more glue, while my wife and I shared concerned looks and anxious pacing.

A half hour later, he came back in and started his next attempt. We heard him banging and scraping around under the house as we stood nervously in the kitchen.

He crawled back out of the accessway and announced he’d be turning on the water again. My wife guided me over to the spot in the dining room where she’d heard the awful sound the first time he did this.

Sure enough, we soon heard the unmistakable sound of water rushing from beneath our feet, seemly coming from the heater vents.

To me it sounded like bankruptcy and catastrophe. It was the full, entirely grim sound of every molecule of water in the greater Portland area hurtling through our plumbing infrastructure at approximately 10,000 gallons per second, earnestly working to convert our crawlspace into a subterranean wetland.  

This was not normal. This was not good. This was not solved. This would not get me baguettes.

I yelled outside “Turn it off! It’s leaking badly!”

I saw his surprised face flash up from his position on the sidewalk, then he bent back down and rotated the wrench. The gushing ebbed.

When he came back in he exclaimed “Well I guess that glue didn’t hold. I’ll try another.” This was not inspiring confidence. “I can’t leave this undone,” he went on. “I gotta finish this job so you guys can have your water supply,” he said. That was the right attitude, I thought. I’m glad he had that going for him, at the very least.

So down he went with his bucket, his wrench and his tubes of glue. More banging, more scraping, more crawling and he was back out again. I suggested we wait ten minutes for things to set well. He agreed.

Back out to the front he went. My wife and I waited inside, huddled close together, eyes closed, praying with all our hearts that this would be the end.

It wasn’t.

Almost instantly, the torrent began anew. The flood below sounded more robust than ever, as if it hadn’t even been remotely deterred by whatever plumbing adhesive had been used to secure the pipes.

I yelled outside again, the rushing water stopped.

He came in, shaking his head in disgust. He said it’s getting pretty wet down there, he’ll need to clean it up. He hauled in his shop vac and dragged the hose down into the crawlspace. He sucked up several gallons of water and dumped it out in the front.

Once it was all cleaned up, he said he wanted to try once more, and did just that. By now it was getting late in the day, and we were all worn out – us from stress and worry, him from manual labor and frustration.

He went down through the access for one last shot. He used all of his glue and all of his determination. We waited for 25 minutes for the glue to set.

Still it wasn’t enough – even after all of that, the pipes did not hold, and the pressure of the water pushed past it all like it was nothing.

“I think we’re done here. We appreciate your efforts but I think we need to wrap it up,” I said. He offered to clean up the water in the crawlspace, and we agreed.

After he dumped out his shop vac and loaded his tools in his car, we paid him $200 for the parts he used, and said our farewells. We watched as he disappeared down the road and out of our life.

My wife and I stood in the entryway still completely shook from the acute trauma of hearing so much high-pressure water blasting into the space under our home. I could not imagine he could have possibly gotten all of it using his shop vac. There must still be a lake lying in dank stillness just beneath the floorboards. This supposed “Top Pro” did not in any way fit the moniker of “Professional”, in my opinion. He was maybe a handyman, and though I’m sure his cousin Bubba was happy with the job he did on the Doughboy in his backyard last year, this man could not be considered a plumber.

We were no closer to tasty baguettes than we were this morning. In fact, we were several steps back at this point. We did not have running water, we did not have an operable stove, and we had lord knows how much abuse inflicted upon our infrastructure.

We needed real help, and not from Angie’s List.