Well, it looks like the problems with Barony St. John continue;

It started with a blocked toilet in the Ladies toilets ... then the Disabled Access toilet was blocked ... then the Gents urinals overflowed.

Originally I thought it was the 20-odd kids who come to Muay Thai three times per week. We go through one to two toilet rolls in each toilet per week - it seems that they all save themselves to come into the hall and take a dump in my toilets.

Anyway, ALL the toilets were now blocked and I tried everything to unblock them -

I poured a bucket of water down each one to try to flush away the blockage....No joy!

I rammed a mop down each one to try to act like a plunger.No joy!

I poured a kettle of hot water down each one (my granny’s old trick).....No joy!

I poured enough drain cleaner down each one to dissolve my mother’s chocolate cake (and that’s no easy task, believe me).....No joy!

There was nothing else for it, I had to get in a specialist drain cleaning company to identify the problem and hopefully provide a solution. It was time for - The Drain Doctors (I kid you not, that’s the name of the company).

So, first step was finding the drain cover and sticking a camera up it to see what’s blocking the drain.

There appeared to be a slight blockage but nothing major - well nothing a high powered water hose wouldn’t shift.

So the Drain Doctor inserted the water hose into the drain and turned on the water.

Five minutes passed - nothing!

No sign of water forcing up into the toilets - no sign of the blockages shifting - nothing!

So the Drain Doctor took his hose out and shoved his camera back up. This was quickly followed by an exclamation of “Oh sh*t!”

It appears that this drain pipe was actually disconnected and what he had actually been doing was firing water under the floor of the hall.

I should’ve known then that this was going to get to be a lot worse than I had expected - in fact, things were going to get a lot, lot worse.

The Drain Doctor decided that if we couldn’t find the way into the toilets from the drains, we had to go from the toilets to the drains. So he opened the connecting pipes in the Ladies and shoved The Worm down it.

Now, The Worm is a mechanical, spiral, flexible rod which twirls and snakes around as it’s inserted into the pipe system. The theory is that it will loosen up anything down there.

After an initial back splash (I’m going to have nightmares about this), The Worm was switched on and slowly fed down the pipe. No joy!

After five hours of trying to free this blockage, Drain Doctor One had to give up. The next day, Drain Doctor Two arrived and after assessing the problem, called for backup. Now we had Drain Doctor Two and Three on site.

After half an hour of no joy they then realised there are two drainage pipes side by side.

Surely the toilets hadn’t been connected to the storm drain pipe when the toilets were refurbished twenty odd years ago?

It was at this point that the fire alarm company decided to pop in and replace the faulty fire alarm in the corridor - and guess whereabouts in the corridor it was?

Yep, of all the forty plus feet of corridor, the alarm was directly above the hatch with the blocked pipes! Typical.

The Drain Doctors reckoned if they cut a hole in the disconnected drain pipe and then drilled a hole in the storm water drain pipe which they thought was actually connected to the toilets, the blockage would simply flow from one drain hole to the other. Brilliant.

Now, if you can imagine an oil drill in Texas striking oil, it will give you an idea of what happened next.

Once the initial eruption died down, the Drain Doctors managed to insert a high pressure water hose and got the drain cleared – Hooray.

But my problems were not over yet;

You see, the drain trap in the storm pipe must have been filling with sediment, toilet paper and faeces over the last twenty odd years and was now blocked, making the flushing of the toilets almost impossible.

So, the solution had to be to get someone in to connect a pipe from the storm drain pipe to the disused drain pipe.

Enter Super Builder, Paul Marchetti from P&M Property Services.

Paul is the guy who has saved me, and more importantly the charity, a fortune in building works since we bought the church buildings in December 2014.

His plan was to reconnect the toilet pipes with the original six inch wide drain pipe and block off the storm drain which was actually disconnected anyway.

Now the toilets are flushing, the drains are flowing and the air is finally clearing. Phew!

The total hall rental profit for the last SIX MONTHS has been lost paying for this little mishap. Quiet literally, money flushed down the drain.

Check out my blog at www.ardrossman.wordpress.com.