Oy, you have my condolences. A very fast snow melt once cost me something like $40K when all was dealt with. And the new owner now has issues, I hear.
I live in a house that was built in 1943 as part of a project to house shipyard workers. About ten years ago the side sewer clogged due to collapsed tiles. Fortunately the city inspector said it was a candidate to be blasted and relined (I think that’s the term) — doubly fortunate because a garage had been built over the line sometime in the interim. Thanks to a low-interest loan from the city, I was able to get the job done without breaking the proverbial bank.
Flash forward to this spring, when the toilet started backing up into the bathtub. Being basically dumb, I decided to uncap the inspection port in the backyard to see if I could determine where the clog was; thank Og I was standing to one side, because I got about a foot-high fountain of … well, you know. I contacted a plumbing service I’d used before and set up an appointment to have their sewer expert look at it, arranged for the Younger Ottlet to stay elsewhere, and used methods best not described to avoid flushing.
Guy comes out and blasts out the clog, then puts a camera down — and finds that the liner ends about six feet from the connection to the city sewer, and one of the old tiles had collapsed. Guy speculated that the company which had done the original job wasn’t licensed and bonded to work on city property, so they’d stopped at the property line. He said they had a machine which would snake down the line and clean up and reline the unfinished part, but it entailed digging down and taking out part of the existing line to give the machine access, then reconnecting everything and restoring the yard as much as possible. Flat rate: $8K.
Did I get ripped off? Perhaps, though a two man crew did spend most of the day on the job. But when you’re over that well-known barrel, your critical facilities tend to shut down. (For the record, I did look up the original company and it seems they’re out of business. Wonder why?)
Well, we are heading for end of the project, it seems. They dug up the old line and have installed the new line in a gravel bed. Seems the city has arbitrarily decided that if you have gutter drainage that empties into the sewer system (which we do), it must now have a double cleanout and p-traps. Even the plumbers are scratching their heads over this one. So instead of two cleanouts in the back yard, we will now have six, which is just ridiculous.
Next up is the inspector on Monday, and then they’ll start back-filling it all, which means the German soldiers encamped in the trenches will have to vacate. Speaking of inspectors, my frau is going to war with the city over the rubber stamp approval of the 2004 inspection that wound up causing this problem. Trust me, you wouldn’t want to be in her way when her ire is up.
Inspection passed!
I feel like I’ve been relatively lucky. For a a few years now, we’ve known that we have a damaged section of our sewer line that lets roots in that cause a blockage maybe once a year. For various reasons around the obscurities of the permitting process and because here I’m responsible for the lateral line all the way out into the street, not just to my property line, our sewer guy has been suggesting we ride this out until the blockages happen frequently enough that we have to bite the bullet.
So yesterday, Sunday, a blockage happened. The callout and service fee for a 9a Sunday cleanout was $185.
Last year when this happened, it was during the week so the cleanout cost was a little less and they ran the camera down for free. $1700 for a weekend cleanout is robbery!
Reminds me of the time that some wasps built a nest inside a crack in our stucco wall. I got some patching cement and sealed the wasps inside. I did get one sting. Wasp stings are much worse than bee stings, but I survived, unlike the wasps.
We have a bunch of mostly-minor repairs that need doing - window trim, reseating bricks in the patio etc. - except in one place on the patio, the bricks are due to a thick tree root making its way toward the house.
We have someone coming to trim some trees and will have him take a look at that to see if it’s a threat to the foundation; it’s possible that simply chopping that off will solve the problem.
The house was built in the 1990s, and the builders put in all these trees that looked good but were weak as hell. Storm 1 (Hurricane Iris? Irene?) did in the first Leyland cypress. Another wind storm did in another. And we had the third removed when we did some landscaping. Of the 4 trees on our street that were downed in that hurricane, 2 were Leylands and 2 were Bradford pears.
This left us with two large pine trees and a largeish maple - in a not-that-large back yard. We just realized that one of the pine trees appears to have died. That’s gonna be $$$ to remove. Ouch. So far the maple seems healthy (though it’s the one whose roots are heading toward the house).
“For the love of God, Montresor Hari_Seldon!” “Yes,” I said, “for the love of God!”
We bought a house in 2017 that had a finished basement. In 2018 it flooded from what appeared to be a window which broke during a thunderstorm. We refinished the basement. 6 days after the job was complete it flooded again. Turns out the broken window was incidental. The actual problem was settling in the yard that funneled water against the house and overwhelmed the sump pump. $5K of french drain and releveling has seemingly fixed it. Still not certain enough to spend another $8K on fixing the ruined flooring and dry wall…
I’ve paid for that before, but not that much.
It was a combo of installing a french drain in a U shape around the house and releveling some of the slope. Not sure what 180ft of french drain would cost by itself.
Except for a horrible rain storm on Bastille Day in 1987 when the sewers backed up, our basement never flooded. The basement of the identical house next door flooded every spring during snow melt season. We never knew why.
My brother had a house like that. In addition to having no running water and having to use an outhouse during all seasons, in the spring his basement would fill up with snow run-off water. The place was a real dump.
When digging foundations for a deck, my parents ran into a streak of sand and pebbles that was not part of the original construction, but apparently a natural feature in our yard. We finally had an explanation to why our crawlspace would fill to overflowing after about 10 years of living there. The water drained from the sand.
We replaced our fridge on short notice 3ish years back, when it died right before Christmas. We got a nice Samsung French door fridge at the Habitat ReStore.
As is common, the icemaker was troublesome from day 1. A friend actually tracked down an unadvertised recall recently and it finally got fixed, free.
But our dishwasher died late last week. It was a rather spendy Bosch, just over 5 years old; it had already had one major repair. Unfortunately, the extended warranty we paid for had expired since then - so we’re out at least 400 bucks to repair it. I’m debating replacing it instead.
When the inspector came to look at our sewage job, he had the contractor run a scope all the way down the line to the street. There is a significant “belly” near the end of the line. My wife thought we should get that fixed (against my better judgment) and we asked the contractor for an estimate. Surprise, surprise: another $20K! Plus they’ll have to destroy part of the yard to do it.
French drain? French door? Can someone please explain these terms? My border neighbors really want to know!
Are you sure you’re talking to the right people? I just had two quotes for replacing the entire line from house to the middle of the street and they were both under $8K. They don’t even dig up the yard to do it with the new trenchless methods. One hole by the house and one in the street and a machine pulls new line into place.
Sounds like your company wants to do yours by the “burst” method, wherein a nosecone is attached to the first piece of pipe and a machine drives it along; then another piece of pipe is attached and the same process happens. You’re avoiding all the extreme labor costs for digging an eight foot deep trench. We don’t have that option, as there is existing pipe, and the new pipe will replace that and tie into other parts of the sewer line. Very labor intensive.