Money Pit

“It’s… beautiful,” Shelly Long says to Tom Hanks, pausing between the words with that breathy Shelly Long-ish confusion. She’s gazing with awe and disbelief at the stunning mansion majestically standing before her: it’s the only house for them to purchase and it’s listed at a ridiculously low price.

The cab that brought them to this property drives away. Hanks, eyebrows furrowed, puts the slip of paper with the address back into his coat pocket. “I know, something must be wrong,” he replies.

Anyone who has seen this 1986 gem ‘The Money Pit’ knows that those foreboding words proved entirely true to a raucous, frequently bizarre, and unbelievable level. Collapsing structures! Electrical fires! Exploding appliances, flying turkeys, sexual trickery! Oh my.

It took buying our house to also find this delightful rom-com absolutely hysterical with a gentle nudge of dear God, what have we (also) gotten ourselves into.

My husband and I were beyond stumped the first time I had to call a plumber for our 1961 home. The bathroom in the front of the house’s toilet was stopped up with something clearly beyond the level of a bear-sized shit since two kinds of plungers and a 25-foot auger couldn’t even touch whatever entanglement was grossing up our pipes. My husband, sweat beading on his forehead, was gobsmacked. To show our toilet readiness in a household with one man and one male teenager one of these plungers was much bigger and red; I’m guessing it was the ultra-special ‘momentous occasion’ plunger or perhaps just generically a more ‘heavy duty’ model. When I saw that bad boy in the tub next to the now nearly overflowing toilet, it was straight to Google.

Perhaps, Google speculated, one of the pipes had become impacted by a tree roots. Perhaps the venting in the house was all bologna and soon I’d be seeing liquid shit start seeping up through all drains and unaffected toilets. Perhaps a child had flushed a toy submarine but regardless, lady – you’re going to need a plumber. So I shut the bathroom door and got to calling.

When George the plumber showed up I appreciated how quickly he spoke and his marvelous use of the word ‘crap’ over a dozen times in two minutes of introductory conversation. After more unsuccessful plunging and snaking, he popped up a 12-ft ladder to inspect the venting system on our roof, then inspected the crawlspace. When he started scratching his head I started sweating.

He used a shop vac to empty the toilet in turmoil and yanked the thing outside, snaking the actual ceramic piece after scolding me for using those colored ‘freshening’ pucks that sit in the tank. “These’ll kill your septic system!” He wagged his finger at me, “trust me, anything that says it’s septic-safe is absolutely not and you’ll be in a world of hurt both with both your crap and money!”

Anything? I thought. I made a mental note to start checking the labels of detergents and chemicals so I didn’t end up in a world full of hurt… or crap.

Once he vacuumed the toilet, he shifted his attention to the pipe that sat below it. He pulled the rag he had stuffed in it to keep the septic gas out and started snaking it. I hovered nearby the whole time to keep track of all the processes going into this bathroom as a first-time homeowner, making mental notes about how all this works and making small talk. It also felt prudent to stick by George because every fifteen minutes or so it seemed to be another $200 so if I had to pay up, I at least wanted the show.

“It’s just the damndest thing,” he said, scratching his head with his crappy gloved hand.

“There’s resistance, but the snake is just moving around it, not catching, and not pulling it. Hard to tell what’s going on down there.”

I felt a flash of relief that it wasn’t a tree wreaking havoc on our pipes but then felt a pull at my wallet as another fifteen minutes ticked by. I excused myself for a moment to use the other facilities, check my bank balance, and probably rub my temples (after a hand washing of course.)

In my absence, George grabbed the shop vac once again as a last-ditch effort to solve this atypical toilet debacle. As I was walking back to the kitchen, I saw George poking around under the sink – when he heard me he spun around and asked me for a garbage bag. He excitedly told me he’d found what the issue was.

“It was a dead cat!” he exclaimed. My eyes popped open wide and my mouth dropped in horror, I momentarily forgot what I was searching under my sink for. The questions flew through my mind so fast my eyes vibrated, flooded with grief for a cat I didn’t know. How would it go down in the first place? How long has it been there? Did the seller flush that cute fat tuxedo cat we’d met a couple times instead of take it with her?

“No,” George quickly piped up, “I’m just messing with you. Felt like you were someone with that sick-puppy sense of humor to break the tension! No there was no cat – but I did find that one time, can you imagine? Damndest thing.”

The transition from ‘Haha got you!’ to him shaking his head with some sadness about his prior toilet-cat was seconds long. Horrified, I somehow managed a chuckle, handed him a trash bag, and wordlessly waited for him to tell me about what demons he had found. Jesus. I wondered if we still had some booze hiding somewhere.

George had ended up pulling out close to half of a garbage bag full of wet, ‘crappy,’ compacted pink insulation from deep inside our pipe. The kind of bubble gum-colored sheets of fluff that one would typically find between the wood beams in your wall and your drywall. I instantly knew how and why it got there. The sellers had a weird closet compartment in that same bathroom that had some exposed insulation with evidence of mice habituation, so the house inspector had asked the sellers to remove it… only, instead of putting it into a garbage can they flushed it. Yards and yards and yards of it: $800+ to pull it out. George kept chuckling all the while, delighted to straight Scooby Doo through another plumbers mystery and close the case.

Imagine my stupidity, my hubris, when I thought the laundry room just ‘needed a coat of paint.’

We’ve been involved in that project for over a month.