Dirty, disgusting ugggghhh!

I came home last night to find 2 inches of water on my kitchen floor and my kitchen sinks full of disgusting gray water. My sinks had been empty of water when I left for work. I called the landlord, who called his management service, who called the plumber. By the time this game of telephone had ensued, my problem had been distilled down to a really leaky faucet. Um....no!

The joint assessment of the plumber and myself is that there is a blockage in the pipe somewhere beyond my house. Because I share a common drain with the upstairs apartment, when they ran water down their sink, it ran down the pipe, hit the blockage and took the path of least resistance which meant surging through the T join of my sink, up my pipes, into the sink and onto the floor. It was an unbelievably nasty mess. I used every large, non-people towel in the house to mop it up (I think it was about 5 bath sheets) and still had to wring and mop, wring and mop. The plumber got sinks drained by removing the trap under my sink but that made an even bigger mess since the pressure of the water caused the trap to blow off instead of simply loosening and there was no way to stop the flood when the bucket got full. My house heard a lot more foul language than it usually does. He was a nice guy though and helped me mop up the mess. Unfortunately, I had a lot of cardboard containers under the sink and on the floor with the recycling (the recycling box itself is cardboard). I've been needing to clean out under the sink for a while but this wasn't my plan for doing it. However, I guess I'll take advantage of the situation and do some purging and reorganizing.

Also along the unfortunate lines, the upstairs neighbors wouldn't answer their door. Now I know you may be wondering why I would assume that they wouldn't answer rather than that they weren't home. Do not forget this is an upstairs apartment in an old complex...I hear every tread from above. Besides that, you could hear the baby crying. *sigh* I finally identified myself as their neighbor but to no avail and gave up. They came down a while afterwords though so I was able to explain the problem. (She said, she was in the bedroom as the excuse but why couldn't HE have answered the door? Someone obviously heard me identify myself). They were very apologetic and readily accepted the need to not use the kitchen sink.

Of course, with all of this mess in my kitchen I have no way of cooking very easily. I ended up having tostadas, refried beans and salsa for dinner. I'm not sure what I'll do about today since I have to be home all day waiting for the plumber.