Plumbing for the Anxious
When you buy a house, you begin to realize that there is a reason for all those do-it-yourself shows on television: it gets expensive hiring someone to come in and do everything that needs to get done.
If you are just entering the kingdom of home ownership, then here is the first project you might want to try: cleaning out the drain trap below your bathroom sink.
In general, plumbing is a good place to start learning about how your house works, in part because it is much less dangerous than electricity. The trap below the bathroom sink is a good starting project because if it does get messed up, you can choose not to use that sink until you get it straightened out and yet you can still learn some critical skills.
You will need the kind of wrench that expands wide enough that it will go around a drain pipe (called a pipe wrench). You also need some Teflon tape that seals pipes, a bucket, and possibly a flashlight. W-D 40 is helpful if you have metal pipes. There is a type of tape you can use on the outside of pipes that seals leaks. This is good to have on hand in your beginning plumbing days as an emergency backup plan.
Look below your sink and you will probably see a pipe that has a j- or p-form. The gunk that goes down the sink gets trapped in the lower part of the j- or p-form so it doesn’t get trapped somewhere more difficult to get to in your house.
Put your bucket under the pipe so any water in the pipe will go into the bucket and not on your floor. Gently work on loosening the large nuts you see at either end of the drain pipe. If your pipe is metal and it is stuck, shoot it with W-D 40 and go do something else for a few minutes. If your pipe is PVC, be careful not to apply so much force you crack the pipe.
Once you have the pipe loosened, trapped water will come out. You will also get to see the kind of stuff that gets stuck in bathroom drains (yuck!). You might want to take the pipe outside and run water from your hose through it.
When it is nice and clean, you can reinstall it. Wrap some Teflon tape around each end of the pipe so that it won’t leak. Tighten the nuts. Keep the bucket right under the drain until you have run some water through to make sure you don’t have any leaks. If you do have leaks, you can try tightening the nuts more, using more Teflon tape, or you can use your emergency back-up outside pipe tape until you can do a better fix.
After you have mastered drain cleaning, you may be up for your next challenge: replacing a faucet!