Mrs R and I were almost done remodelling the basement bathroom; rebuilt vanity, new sink/faucet, waterproof the outside wall and paint everything, new toilet (not installed yet).
And then I took a shower one morning in the upstairs bathroom and all the water ended up on the basement floor. Roto-Rooter came out and ran a camera up the main drain, starting at the septic tank (we had to hire a guy to dig it up, and another guy to pump it), and the (cast-iron) pipe had collapsed, right under the middle of the basement. R-R’s estimate for digging up the basement floor and replacing the collapsed tee was unreasonable, so we went with a different outfit. And started moving stuff out of the hobby room and games closet, into the garage. They jackhammered up the floor and discovered that the pipe near the tee was so corroded that it just kept breaking when they tried to connect to it.
Eventually we ended up emptying almost the entire basement into the garage, and had a lot more floor dug up. The main line got relined (a fascinating process–took 'em two tries) and a couple branch lines dug up and replaced.
Near the end, I asked the site lead about installing the toilet in the downstairs bathroom (the toilet was in its box out in the garage). The site lead gave me a bit of trouble, so I told him that the manager had said they’d throw in the toilet install as part of our FOURTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS of work. He said nothing more, just had a guy install the toilet.
And then, because that wasn’t costly enough, we got the basement floor redone in sheet vinyl flooring. Although I’d tried to be careful about pulling up the vinyl tiles so the floor could be jackhammered, enough of them broke that new flooring was in order. And new shelves for the hobby room.
But it all looks pretty nice now, and there haven’t been any floods in the basement since.
I actually started a thread to bitch about this: Our month of home-repair hell