Recently, I made a terrible mistake. I asked my husband to clean our mudding supplies. In part of our unending quest to remove the excessive texture on our walls, we regularly slap joint compound on a few walls and call it a day. Sometimes, that slapping happens when it’s nearly lunch time, so while I go to whip up a nice meal, I hope everything will be cleaned properly with lots of water by my dear husband. “Properly” means most of the mud goes in the junk bucket and only trace amounts have to be wiped off our tools or rinsed off our paint roller. Unfortunately, that was not the case, and the next day when I next used the upstairs bathroom I found it to be rather clogged, dried, and next to impossible for me to do anything about. It wasn’t visible on the top, but as I ran the water to wash my hands, the sink was quickly overflowing.
Use Vinegar and a Hand Plunger to Unclog a Sink of Dried Joint Compound
I had tried a few different things. Vinegar, baking soda and vinegar, boiling hot water, and my bathroom plunger. None of those quite did the trick, though since mild acids such as vinegar dissolve limestone it was definitely a step in the right direction. Short of having to buy a snake to go down the drain, I decided to try out a small sink plunger. The ones I had found at the local home improvement store didn’t offer great suction (which, like the crazy person I am, I had tested on every single wall I came across while I was there), so I decided to order this questionable looking thing from Auntie Amazon instead.
Okay, strange looks aside, it’s a suction machine. I tried cleaning out my sink again today since I really didn’t want to have to replace a P-trap I had just swapped out when I moved in, adding a bit of vinegar into the sink to erode the limestone, and I used the hand plunger.
Ta-da! Fixed!
