Flying W Things

I threw away a perfectly good pressure washer Monday.

A couple weeks ago I was reading an article in the paper about home improvement. The gist of the article was that lots of homeowners get in over their head on projects and end up calling in professionals to help them finish up. The subtext was that most of these folks end up paying more for these projects than they would have had they called in the pros up front, mainly because they screw things up that have to be repaired.

I chuckled to myself about these poor saps and their reliance on hired guns to keep their homes from falling into disrepair.

(Astute readers can no doubt see where this is going.)

Two weeks ago we had a fairly heavy rainstorm that flooded a good chunk of our back yard. A little research with the hose led me to the conclusion that the one drainpipe from our back yard to the street - which drains all our back yard and 2/3rds of our gutters - was blocked. As we were expecting another big storm, I wanted to get the drain unclogged as soon as I could.

I tried running a hose down the drainpipe from the backyard but that quickly filled up the pipe and started flooding the yard again. So I moved to the drain outlet in the curb, where I thought the nearby street tree's roots may be causing the problem. I found a pressure washer my father-in-law had given us, screwed three parts of it together to make a 10-foot wand, attached the hose at full blast, and started pushing the whole business up the drain from the curb.

Eight feet later, forward progress was halted. I gave a few tenative jabs with the pressure washer and then started to pull it out. (What do you know? It's stuck!) I yanked and yanked and finally it broke free. Unfortunately, while three sections went in, only two came out. I had wedged three feet of metal tubing in with whatever else was blocking the drain.

Sigh.

On Monday, Katy called a plumber who had fixed a similar blockage for some friends of ours. They plopped a roto-rooter type machine at the curb and unblocked the drains in short order, without needing to do anything other than turn on the machine and pay out cable. After removing the root blocks, they dug up the section of drain that I had clogged, cut out the pipe, removed the pressure washer segment, went to the plumbing supply store for replacement parts, replaced the drain section, and relaid the sod on the lawn.

I figure my weekend shenanigans tripled the bill. Nice.

And that, my friends, is why I threw the pressure washer away.