Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Hold your nose!!

Today was a really smelly day. The drain from the bath etc was overflowing. It is just outside the door we use most to go in and out of the house, but fortunately the water runs away from the house to pool under the clothes line! So I used a cute kids bucket with a smiley face painted on it to scoop all the water out of the fat trap, but it still overflowed when I did a load of washing, (which I donned gumboots to hang up!) So I called our landlord, said I had done my best and it was his turn.

I then did our weekly run to the tip with our rubbish, and the last, or almost last bits of furniture wrapping paper. I finally did last nights washing up, which I had been saving so as not to add extra dirty water to the faulty drain, and discovered that the piece that goes inside the breadmaker was missing! It is a small metal paddle that stirs the dough. Total catastrophy, we can make no bread without it, we can buy island bread, but of course Dave's is WAY superior. So I phoned around and found out who controlled the tip, which is now closed until Friday afternoon, and it looks like rain tonight. We went in and fetched a key, and set off to find 'our' bag of rubbish in the landfill dump! Well, there were a lot more bags with drawstring tops than I had expected, but we found it, and transferred the contents into a new bag we had brought with us. The flies helped, and some of the contents had been in there a week. But the paddle was not there! We came home and found it in the rubbish I had thrown out after I got back from the tip! I said words.

While we were making a cup of coffee to get over it all, our landlord, John, arrived to deal with the drain. It was back into the smelly water, (which gets cleaner with each time the trap is emptied, I must say) But John could not get it clear either, but we did establish that the kitchen water does not go through the fat trap, only the bath and laundry water does, so we just need to live with it overflowing until a plumber can get here. But there is one on the island, so hopefully we will see him soon!

I have already had a shower, and later, a good boot and arm washing, but I am really looking forward to a good scrub down before bed tonight

2 comments:

  1. Ummm....the fat trap does *not*, in fact, do anything to trap the fat that comes from the kitchen drain? Where, one surmises, there may be fat in the water?

    Or is this a "divided by a commmon language" moment?

    At any rate...best, best wishes to you from Casa de Wicklund in Colorado, USA.

    Lin

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  2. No, the 'fatty' water from the kitchen goes straight to the sewerage.

    Obviously when other people bath/shower their fat washes off, and this goes to the 'fat trap'. Unfortunately my fat stays on, so this is a rather useless feature of our new house!

    Basically I think the original builder got his pipes a bit muddled, or muddy, but the fat trap was pretty gross never the less!

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