Nope, that's pretty much the worst.

I've spent most of my life in pre-WWI houses so I'm usually pretty happy if plumbing works at all.

Well, it's not a nightmare, but we've been sleeping in the living room for two months due to plumbing problems.

If it's a contest, I think you win.

Generally, flushing before showering isn't a good idea anyway.

Oooh...I can top that. I bought an old house. Everything looked fine. I thought it was weird that there was fabric on a lot of walls, but whatever...it was old people and I thought maybe they liked padded floral walls.

We noticed that the bathtub upstairs wasn't draining as well as we thought it should, but didn't really worry about it. At the time, we were both working 70 hour weeks, and figured that since the house had just been inspected, it was fine.

So, one morning, I took a bath, then cleaned the tub, flushed the potty, then went downstairs. I was sitting on the couch, in the room under said bathroom, when I heard a weird noise. Looked up, just in time to see a vast majority of the second floor come soggily down into the first floor. Apparently, the grey-water leaking had been going on for years, and all the new paint and fabric on the walls was to hide the damage.

Repairs took me, a general contractor, a large military insurance company, and a team of reconstruction guys almost 6 months to fix. It was tens of thousands of dollars in repairs. I learned how to hang drywall, weld pipes, lay tile and the joys of jacking up and leveling a 100 year old house. It was an absolute disaster. Almost everything had to be replaced; it was ridiculous.

Pretty much as soon as we were done, we listed the house and got the hell out, before the money pit struck again.

Uh, I think Dejah wins.

Years ago, my then-girlfriend and I lived in a rented house with a basement that we never went into. One day, she said, 'Yuck, what's that smell?' Long story short, the basement was flooded with about six inches of raw sewage.

In another rented house, one of my friends was visiting, and he said 'Hey, your toilet's kinda wobbly. We should tighten it.' And so I said, 'Yeah, okay, that makes sense.' And so I got a big adjustable wrench, probably a foot long, that I'd inherited, and tightened the two nuts at the base. I got 'em pretty snug, and then I took the wrench off. And my buddy said 'No, no, those bolts have to be tight.' And I thought to myself 'Well, I don't know much about plumbing, but that sounds plausible,' and so I put the wrench on again and cranked it down as hard as I could. The porcelain cracked around the bolt hole. And I thought to myself, 'You know, this dude just might be full of shit.'

So, I was using the bathroom in my apartment. I finish and flush. Gurgle. The toilet SHOOTS UP a blast of brown water then begins to leak out all over the floor in huge, gushing rushes. My pants are on the floor, with my cellphone in them. I race to the plunger, to the paper towels, but I'm interrupted, pantsless and wet, by pounding on my door. It's the downstairs neighbor. Water is flooding into her bathroom and shorted out her light.

And that is why I don't leave pants on the floor anymore.


(this was the same apartment where, after turning on the faucet to pill a pan, I noticed a strange sound coming from below. I opened the sink cabinet and am greeted by a GUSH of water and sacks of soggy rice. The drainage pipe had just...dissolved, like sugar.)

We had our roof replaced and one of the guys dropped a pry bar down the vent stack. At 11 PM I went downstairs to clean the cat box and found sewage everywhere. I spent 2 hours cleaning it up before flying out the next morning at 6 AM.

We got a plumber in to route things out and everything was OK for a week, until we had a repeat complete with an early morning flight. Plumber cleared it out and ran a camera though and we found the pry bar.

Thankfully we had used Sears for the roofing install and had a check for $3K that afternoon.

I was away on a work trip and got a frantic phone call from my partner because sewerage was gushing out of the toilet. It had flooded the whole bathroom and some of the kid's bedroom and started out toward the kitchen before it stopped. I can only imagine the sheer nastiness of cleaning it up.

When I got home, I investigated and found the plumber had installed an inspection port wrong and partly blocked the pipe. When I opened it, the pipe was literally blocked solid. On opening the port, the blockage started to ever so slowly move down toward the sewerage treatment system and it occurred to me to back away. A few seconds later a geyser of raw sewerage erupted from the inspection port to about 2 feet high.

I ended up having to get our emergency fire pump out to try and flush all the sewerage away and the grass grew like crazy in a line from there down the hill for months afterward.

No, she never forgave me.

I was asked once by an unassuming woman to see what was going on at her house. I told her I didn't really know a lot about plumbing, but went anyway because she seemed nice and was a neighbor of mine.

We went up to the second floor of her house and into her daughter's bedroom. There was raw sewage everywhere, the bed was violently rocking back and forth and her daughter took one look at me and says, "YOU'RE GONNA DIE IN HEEEEERRE!"

We bought our house from "flippers," folks who'd bought the house only a few months before, did some quick renovations, and re-sold it for a quick profit. When we looked over the house, I ran water in the upstairs tub, just to check water pressure and stuff, and it was fine.

The first time my wife took a shower, however, water cascaded through the downstairs ceiling. Upon investigation, we found that the renovators hadn't soldered the shower pipes, just dry-fitted them. I learned how to solder pipes, a skill that has come in handy multiple times since, as we've found lots of other shoddy plumbing.

No sewage incidents (yet), thankfully.

A pipe burst in the wall at the condo I bought a day before the inspection. (It was fixed and the inspector said it was fine.)

Of course, then we found out that the entire fucking complex was done with polybutylene pipe. Which has had a class action lawsuit against it since it is complete crap (the fittings moreso than the pipes) and has a tendency to explode without warning.

The pipe that had been repaired by the previous owner burst on my first night in the new house. My downstairs neighbors (who had just finished repairing the damage to their unit from the first leak) ran upstairs and helped me turn the water off (since I was planning on doing the shutoff/emergency shit walkthough the next GODDAMN DAY).

Pipe was fixed, everything was cool. I started to save up to rip out the pipes and replace them with copper.

Then my downstairs neighbors again tell me they have a wet wall, which is strange, because I'd basically been living with the water turned off except to shower, wash dishes, and flush the toilet. The pipes under my bathroom sink had been leaking constantly. Another fucking $600 repair.

And then I went on vacation and my brother and his contractor buddies came in and replaced all the pipes. And installed a new washer/dryer.

No sewage things yet. But still, those pipes are fucking evil.

AND MY MAIN SHUTOFF VALVE IS STILL FUCKING LEAKING. (That can't be fixed until I get the water company to replace their valve that is frozen open in the driveway outside the building.)

The year after my ex and I moved to CA, she offered our house as a place to stay for prospective grad students who wanted to visit the university. I wasn't really in favor, not liking to share my house with strangers, but I was overruled.

The girl who came to stay with us was nice enough, but one thing was really strange -- she wouldn't eat in front of us. We took her out to dinner one night -- wouldn't eat. We cooked dinner the next night -- wouldn't eat. She left the next morning before we got up. That's when we discovered she was bulimic -- which discovery was made when I got up in the morning to use the bathroom, flushed, and was suddenly standing in two inches of really, really nasty stuff.

She did end up enrolling, and for a few years I'd see her around town every once in a while. Strangely, she never said Hi.