Have you ever had the opportunity to take an axe to your kitchen sink? Wish you could? If you hate dishes as much as I do, perhaps you too have fantasized about doing just that…

Well I recently did – but it wasn’t to destroy the sink, it was to destroy a Mason jar lid. Yup just a lid that had gone feral.

Mason jars are a staple in my life. I use them to store a variety of things in the kitchen. My favourite is my teabags because I can see the contents (my large variety of teas) at a glance. Recently I also started to make a delicious oatmeal breakfast in mason jars. Both of these use wide-mouth jars which regularly get washed in my kitchen sink.

One evening, I was ready to empty the water from the sink, but could not reach the strainer. A wide-mouth jar lid was lodged in the sink drain. The beauty of it was that it was a perfect fit. So no matter how much I tried, I could not move it.

At first I tried a few knives but even my slimmest blade could not get in beside the edge. Then I tried banging it with kitchen tools, including my ice-cream scoop, to mangle it and jiggle it loose. Couldn’t mangle it enough. Finally after half-an-hour of fighting with the lid, I got tired and went to bed. I am a firm believer in the old adage: “sleep on it.”

These are the tools used to remove the wide-mouth mason jar lid from the sink drain

The next morning, it still wouldn’t budge and now I had a sink full of cold greasy water to play in. Fun!!! More banging to distort it didn’t work. While looking for the sledge-hammer that I thought was in the closet, I found the camping axe. Ahhh – that should work just as well.

And it did. The axe made a hole in the lid that was large enough for me to slide a screwdriver in. A knife wouldn’t work because it doesn’t have enough rigidity. (In fact the orange knife now has a bent tip.) Jamming the screwdriver in, I was able to make a lever to pry it up. Voila – that was easy!

Good thing, I had a night’s sleep and a clear mind when I tackled it. I’d hate to think what damage I might have done with the axe at 11 pm – seeing as I was both angry and frustrated!

I can never imagine these things happening. But when they do, I always think that I must be the ONLY person in the world who could make it happen. It is me and my egotistical super-powers. And then I think, “no – there is probably at least one other fool like me who is sitting there at midnight trying to drain their sink”, so I should do them a favour and post my solution on the Internet.

So like all those other “knowledge bases” out there, I will close with the question:

“Did you find this helpful?”

__YES   __NO   __ONLY SLIGHTLY   __THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN TO ME

Now if only I could find a solution to my Microsoft problems before I take the same axe to my laptop too.

BTW – if you do not have an axe handy in the closet, you might try this plunger method that I found on the Internet today. It might be less violent and you might even be able to save the lid. Mine is toast now ;o)