The problems with our kitchen's water supply can be reduced to: servants!
When I first moved to Paris, I was determined not to have an apartment with the kitchen in the back. How inconvenient was that? I soon gave up. ALL the Paris apartments that would fit my family had the kitchen in the back. And most of those kitchens were tiny with one little window. Why?
When these apartments in the beaux quartiers were built, more than a hundred years ago, le Tout-Paris had live-in servants who came down the service stairs first thing in the morning from their tiny chambres de service on the seventh floor (no elevator), with the "French toilets" down the hall from their rooms. The maîtres stayed in the front of the house, with its moldings and marble fireplaces, and never set foot in these regions. So the kitchen in old Paris apartments is always in the back, and usually cramped and unpleasant. Sometimes the stoves are at knee level... French servants were tiny.
Naturally, as servants disappeared and so did familles nombreuses (families with tons of kids), people started to want a kitchen close to the dining room. So like everyone else around here, we turned one bedroom into a kitchen and a kitchen into a bedroom. The problem is that the kitchen is now in the wrong place for Paris plumbing. Instead of a broad metal pipe going straight down into the building's canalisation, our new kitchen's water supply goes through a little PVC pipe that makes several turns as it winds through bedrooms to the old kitchen pipes. Lots of room there for problems, and that's what happened this week.
