How to Get Your Own Earring Out of the Trap

Okay, for all of my feminist girl powerness, there are somethings I really, really hate to do for myself. Home repairs totally fall into that category. A few days ago my brand new earring that I had only worn once fell down the drain in the bathroom sink. I begged and pleaded for my dad or brother to come over and retrieve it with no dice. My dad (kindly) told me, that this was something I could handle myself and walked me through the steps using his own bathroom sink as a visual model. So tonight I decided to tackle it. And, of course, blog about it. I think it falls under domesticity attempts. It was actually pretty easy and took less than five minutes. A definite success for my first venture into plumbing. To retrieve your earring out the trap you will need:

A bucket (cat walking into frame optional)

Open up that sink door and take a peek at what you see. It should hopefully look like this. If you have metally looking pipes instead of plastic ones, you might need a wrench of some kind. The little U shape is the trap where your earring should be. It is filled with water (and probably some other gross stuff, but try not to think about that).

Clear away all of the stuff under the sink and position the bucket under your pipes. There's a little ring on the back end of the U. Give it a twist. Mine was pretty easy to loosen. If it's tight you could probably use a wrench. As you can see in the picture the ring will slide up and the U will slide away.

From there you can just kind of tug the other end of the U off. Warning: it is filled with water and smells kind of gross. Another purpose of the U tube besides being a catch, is that it stays filled with water and keeps the sewery smell from coming up the pipes into your bathroom. Anyways, tug the whole U thing off.

And dump it into your bucket. The water was so gross I couldn't see the earring but I could hear a "plink" as it hit the bucket.

There it is!

Then just jam the U pipe back on and twist the ring over it. Keep the bucket there and do a little test run with the water to make sure everything is back in place.

Not too hard and kind of empowering. Go me!