Wednesday, January 11, 2006

The Beast's Second Feeding: Sewer Line!

Yech, this one may be a setback in overcoming my fear of plumbing. On a snowy Sunday in December I went to the basement for something and noticed the remnants of a stream of water on the floor. Water down there is not unusual during a heavy rain but this was snow. Well, being in snowy Sunday state of mind I switched directly into denial mode and went about my business. The next morning I went down to do some laundry and noticed more water and...stuff, papery stuff. And it stank. I thought maybe the wax wing on the first floor toilet had blown but it wasn't that simple. After some investigation I realized that everything that we flushed was going down the drain pipe, out through the Bluestone wall of the basement, and then back in through the wall around the pipe.

I called a general contractor I'd had in a few weeks before to get an estimate on a paving project to get a referral for a plumber. Surprisingly I got him to come out that day and have a look. My worst fear was confirmed : a cracked sewer line. He had to call the contractor as well because he would need to do the digging. We scheduled the 2 teams for the next day pending no more snow. Fortunately there was no snow the next day so they came in to break up the nice flagstone paving on that side of the house and manually dig a 5 foot deep by seven foot long by 3 foot wide trench through the sodden heavy clay soil to expose the broken clay pipe. Clay pipe! It looked like a Roman ruin down there.

Anyhow by the end of the day we had a new section of PVC pipe down there and another unpaved area around the foundation to deal with in the Spring. A nice $1600 Christmas gift for the house. It's going to mighty busy around here this Spring!