SPOON: a sink that DRAINS

[kellan_the_tabby]

[ An empty, mostly clean stainless steel sink basin. There’s a drain strainer at the bottom, and a tiny bit of white plumbing pipe is visible below. ]

Okay, it took a while.

… okay, it took years.

But! I finally went back to the local plumbing supply place, bought the things I needed with some assistance from the lady behind the counter …

… & then, on a day when I had the spoons to do the thing AND Morgyn had the spoons to get the dish tubs out of the sink, I actually got it done.

We have a sink. That DRAINS.

[ Below the sink, horizontal white piping leads down from each sink basin and meets in the middle, from which more pipe angles downward and to the left. Soapy water is gushing from the bottom into a clear, square bin. There is no water anywhere it isn’t supposed to be. ]

Morgyn spent probably ten minutes pouring water into each sink basin, in turn, & then we’d watch it pour into the bin, & cackle.

SO GOOD

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Comments

[danabren]

<3 <3 <3

[kellan_the_tabby]

We're getting there! We're just getting there very, very slowly!

[siliconshaman]

It's the little things you don't notice until you don't have them, and when you get them back it's so good!

I'm in the middle of that with no hot water in the shower.

BTW is the catchment bin the final set up, or are you planning on adding more plumbing to that so the water goes elsewhere (like a big outside grey-water tank)?

[kellan_the_tabby]

THAT, YES

oh no cold showers are SO BAD, I hope you can get it dealt with soon!

& yeah, eventually that'll run to the septic system, but first we need the septic system. little steps!

[acelightning73]

Chinese grocery stores, and the housewares sections of stores that cater to lower-income people, often sell "sink drain strainers" that sit inside the sink opening. The one I bought has a ring on the side to make it easy to remove and toss the food scraps into the trash. I think it cost me $1.99

[kellan_the_tabby]

I think they had them at the plumbing store, too, separate from the sink basket part. It's SO useful having an actual store that's just plumbing stuff, everyone who works there knows SO much about it.

[acelightning73]

I love plumbing stores and lumber yards and electrical supply stores. In one of the houses we lived in, the second floor got too hot and some of the first floor rooms were cold. We had central forced air heating. Anyway, my son's bedroom was too hot. I went to the electrical supply store and got a fan and a line-powered thermostat. I cut through the floor of the bedroom and the ceiling of the "den" downstairs, and when it was too hot upstairs it blew the hot air down into the den. It worked perfectly til we moved to another house.

(This house heats unevenly, because there's no insulation on the second floor - it was eaten or used as nesting material by raccoons. There are two rooms upstairs, not connected by a door or anything. The room we sleep in gets very cold when the weather is windy. The other room, where the computers are, gets too hot if we adjust the furnace to keep the bedroom warm. I'd love to put a vent in the wall that separates the two rooms, but we rent, so we can't damage or modify the structure.

[kellan_the_tabby]

That is a BRILLIANT fix, & also HILARIOUS, not gonna lie.

But UGH renting is SO frustrating, especially when there's something which would be SUCH an easy fix!

[acelightning73]

I have a nightstand on my side of the bed. It's actually a small chest of drawers for a child's room. Since I happen to have a cold, I wanted to be able to reach the box of tissues on the nightstand, but the box was on the side away from the bed, and I had to get out of bed to blow my nose. So I decided to rearrange everything on top of the nightstand. There was a an extension cord that had had a number of things plugged into it, but I got rid of the answering machine when we canceled the land line. Currently it's just a clock radio and a touch-to-turn-on lamp. I was planning on getting a narrow basket and attaching it to the wall with COmmand hooks (the ones you can remove without annoying your landlord). But when I looked at the Command products, they had a 'picture shelf' - narrow and the right size. I expected to put an outlet strip on it, but the outlet strips were too wide. But the end of the extension cord fit nicely. And when I plugged the wall-wart for the radio into the extension, it fit perfectly on the shelf. I just have to put some zip-ties or something around the wires so they lie neatly on the little shelf. So there's a small marble bowl for random bits of costume jewelry, and a plastic bin for the pile of hair scrunchies and oversized safety pins. And the only other things on the surface are holders for my phone and my glasses, and a Feng Shui mirror because the door into the room is next to the nightstand (which is believed to be "inauspicious"). My nightstand is the only thing I use a lot that's anywhere near "neat". (The drawers hold accessories and pajamas and nighties). It makes the bed feel wider when I lie down to sleep. (THe Command line has things like that shelf, robe hooks for the bathroom, and all sorts of other useful things for people who rent, or who live in a dorm and aren't allowed to nail stuff to the wall.)

This house really needs a whole house upgrade to split/cycle heating and cooling, and probably improved electrical power, and I'd also love to have a Generac, because every time there's any heavy weather (which is often) we lose power for an unpredictable length of time. But our landlord always fixes serious things for us (like when a pipe froze in the crawl space and we used several hundred gallons of water in a week), and he's charging us the same rent as when we moved here in 2004. We're a nice elderly couple, we don't give him trouble, and he knows that we used to be homeowners and we can patch a hole in the sheet rock or stop the toilet from overflowing.