Always Eat Your Vegetables
Great moments in building history: Spinach in a garbage disposal can be a nasty thing
In 1976, I bought my first house, a two-bedroom, one-bath fixer-upper. It was on the side of a hill, and the crawlspace under the house promised lots of potential. I spent the winter moving dirt for a room, and the spring building. The new basement was nice, but it needed a bathroom. I could fit a shower, toilet and sink into a small corner but only if the shower wall covered the sewer clean-out, so in went the shower. The next year, I got married, and we updated the kitchen. I built some cabinets and installed a dishwasher and a garbage disposal.
I was never a big fan of vegetables, and spinach was my least favorite. One night, a large amount of spinach went down the garbage disposal. Right away, we knew this was a mistake. The hot water from the dishwasher stopped moving down the sink and poured onto our new linoleum floor. Not to panic—I could fix this.
I undid the trap under the sink and ran a snake down the pipe. It went about 3 ft. and stopped. It wouldn’t make a sharp turn a little way down the pipe. So maybe that was what that clean-out in back of the shower wall was for. I still didn’t panic. After all, I was the guy who bought all the pipes for the downstairs bath in only one trip to the hardware store. Surely I could handle this.
I remembered the roof. There was a vent pipe up there. It was dark, and of course, it was raining. But the sink was full of dishwasher grime and spinach. I got my ladder and my trusty snake. My wife was at the sink watching the water level, which had not moved in a while.
I dropped the snake down the vent on the roof. It hit that sharp turn, but this time, I had some room to work. I plunged and I pulled and I cursed, and just when I was about to give up, I felt the snake break through. My wife yelled from the kitchen, “The sink is draining!” I felt the pride of job satisfaction as I pulled up the snake and strutted down from the roof like the plumbing pro I thought I was. We agreed never to put spinach down the disposal again and went to bed.
In the next few weeks, the plumbing continued to work well. The kitchen sink drained better than it had in the past. The house was 50 years old, and I figured it must have had a lot of crud in its pipes. But the plumbing pro had taken care of that.
Then we started to notice a smell in the downstairs shower stall. My nose led me under the house with a flashlight. As soon as I opened the trap door, I could tell we had another job for the plumbing pro. The remaining crawlspace had water in it, and it wasn’t clean water. It contained coffee grounds and eggshells. With my flashlight, I peeked around. Suddenly, things became very clear. Afraid of what I would see, I shined the light against the wall behind the shower. It was covered with a month’s supply of kitchen-sink garbage-disposal waste. That weekend, I tore out my new shower wall. In the stud bay behind it, I found evidence of everything that we had put down the sink in the past month. I also found an old kitchen drainpipe that had separated from its 90° clean-out elbow. It was rusty, but it never would have broken if not for the plumbing pro and his trusty snake.
It took me a while to shovel out all the coffee grounds and disposal garbage from the stud bay behind the shower. When I put the wall back together, I added a handy shelf for shampoo. It unscrewed from the tile, and behind it was a hole to reach a kitchen clean-out. I could have done this the first time I built the wall. Then again, maybe I just should have eaten my spinach instead of sending it down the sink.
Drawing by: Jackie Rogers
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