Oh poo

So yesterday my husband was an E. coli nightmare for the better part of the day.

Two days ago I used the bathroom and then immediately got in the shower. When I got out, I noticed water leaking from the base of the toilet. The bowl was not overflowing, it was leaking from one small spot where the base meets the floor.

I quickly turned off the water, dried the standing water and then left it for like 30 minutes. Turned it back on, flushed with no problem, chalked it up to a clog in the line that dissolved given a little time.

Well the next day, the same thing happened to John. Only the bowl overflowed also. The dirty bowl. Eww.
He also was not as quick in turning off the water. So it took a couple towels to dry it up, and about a foot of carpet outside the door got wet. Then I thought my incident was worth mention. "What? Why didn't you tell me? I think we need a new toilet. It's leaking at the base." (Secret glee on my part.) I detest our current toilet. It's soooo low flow it's crazy. The bowl is constantly dirty. Paper gets stuck to the side requiring multiple flushes. The handle is over on the side. I have lots of reasons I dislike our toilet.

So after a call to his dad he decided that actually it was likely just a bad wax ring seal. Cheap to replace. But you do have to remove the toilet. Welllll, if you're going to have to take the toilet off anyway, maybe we could just replace it.

Que 2 hours later when I'm back from running an errand, and we're off to Lowes to get a new throne. After debate and research, we get the commode. I picked the model with the "Everclean" technology and the "Powerflush".

Two hours after that old john is out and new john is in. Lovely.

Until I took a shower in a our guest bathroom (our bathroom hadn't been decontaminated yet). A few minutes in my husband says- "You have to hurry- your shower is making our toilet back up." Oh I was done in less than a minute.

So we waited for the water to go down, then flushed. It seemed ok, but John knew something had to be wrong, so he called his dad. But first he took a shower in our bathroom to scrub off the excrement water he's built up a thin layer of. Well, that made our toilet bubble. Weird.

So he calls his dad, who tells him there has to be a clog somewhere, and that he can call a plumber for $200 or rent an "electric snake" from Home Depot and DIY it.

By this point it's like 4pm. Did I mention I was hosting the monthly church ladies get-together at my house tonight? My house that until this point was clean and running smoothly... Oh yeah, there's that too.

And then Sophia would not go down for her last nap. She's teething and congested and would scream every time I tried to lay her down, even though she would sleep fine when I held her. And my food need to be put on to warm. And she also probably couldn't sleep with the loud pneumatic sounds of a coil banging around in our plumbing pipes. Disaster was setting in.

I finally put Sophia down and had to just let her scream. It was nearly 6pm. I called Roto-Rooter. I walk in to the bathroom to tell John this and he's sweating and I see literally small waves of sewage flowing out of the hole in our bathroom floor where a commode belongs. "We need a plumber, this is sewage," he says. Grrrreat. Oh, and no one can use the bathrooms.

I call my good friend 4 doors down, panicking. Can I use your toilet, can my guests use your toilet, can my husband take a decon shower in your bathroom????

6:15 arrives and my first guest is here. I go and scoop up my screaming child and hand her off to be adored and entertained. I greet everyone with "If you need to use the restroom give me 5 minutes notice, my friend 4 doors down will let us use her bathroom." The Roto-Rooter truck prepared everyone for problems before they even knocked.

The gracious ladies took it all in stride. No one had to take a long trip to the potty. We visited, I heated my food in the microwave, and we had a good time. All the while John and a plumber are at work. Turns out we had a lot of roots in our pipes. He was surprised it was even flushing. Also we have some low spots in our plumbing. He recommended pouring a 5-gallon bucket of water in our toilet once a week to keep the system flowing. Apparently some of our pipes run straight when they should be angled downward.

So about an hour before everyone left, our plumbing was restored. To the tune of almost 200 bucks. Plus the new toilet. I gladly paid the bill. And at 9pm John finally ate dinner and showered. Apparently while he was trying to be the DIY roto-rooter he was sprayed in the face and just about everywhere else with poop water. Gross.

Today while I was at work John reinstalled the new toilet and coated the bathroom and carpet in a 10% bleach solution. I've actually yet to use the new porcelain god. But if TP sticks in the bowl, I'm gonna cry.