The Now Infamous Chopstick + Red Duct Tape + Spoon. (This is a reenactment.)

I spent the greater part of 3 hours trying to fix my kitchen sink – and like most problems in life, it was self-made. Silly me thought it would be okay that some clam chowder go down the tiny drain, silly me got schooled by life.

1) Being a cheapskate, I tried first to go with the cheapo Drano alternatives. First some kitchen degreasing soap and salt, followed by hot water. When that didn’t work, I tried the old school route of baking soda, vinegar, and then followed by hot water. The result? A sink filled with a lot of water and soap bubbles.

2) Because of all the water in the sink, I had to scoop out water into a separate pan and dispose in my bathroom sink.

3) Then I came up with the brilliant idea of perhaps I could scoop out some of the food in the drain – which is just shy of a chopstick length. I used a spoon smaller than a chopstick length, which inevitably fell down the drain with everything else.

4) After trying – and failing – to pick up the spoon in the drain with chopsticks (whoever is reading this is laughing right now, right?), I finally thought that I should just bring out the big guns. there was a spoon that needed to be rescued after all — open up the drain with a wrench.

Side Story: A few years ago I had purchased a specific wrench to open up a sink drain because I had dropped my diamond earring in the bathroom sink. Before you think I’m a high roller, my only pair of diamond earrings was bought at church auction for $25 and is more like a diamond accent than anything, but I had successfully bought diamond earrings all on my own so I didn’t want to lose it. So I bought this wrench that easily drained my old townhouse’s bathroom sink.

Current Story: …but not so much my current kitchen sink.

5) That having failed I decided to just go and buy some drano at the Walgreens at the corner…the generic kind for $1.99. While there I thought to myself, of what I could do to get the spoon out. The result? Chopstick + scotch tape + measuring spoon = success.

So then I poured in the drano, waited a half hour, and then poured in some hot water. Result? A sink full of water and generic drano.

6) I was getting pretty disheartened at this point and started poking the drain some more with my scotch tape chopstick spoon, only for the spoon to come loose and fall into the sink. Have you ever felt a sense of bad deja vu? Yeah….

7) Then came the Chopstick + Red Duct Tape + Spoon = Success.

8 ) I finally decided to go buy a plunger at Walgreens. It was this cool plastic looking tube kind. I swear the woman at the cash register was like “wasn’t this chica here before?” But that potential social awkwardness was worth it. Cost: $5. Estimated plunger use time? Less than 1 minute. Success rate? 100%

So what have I learned in fixing the kitchen sink? I learned that sometimes you just have to go through a lot of different ways to find the answer to a problem and, most likely, along the way, you’ll probably create more problems. But this – and other life adventures – has always shown me that answers exist and more likely than not, they are like #8: simple. And that usually the simple answer is unfortunately preceded by #1-#7.

-cct