A French drain is a trench with rock or gravel at the bottom, sometimes with a perforated pipe as well. It’s meant to collect surface runoff and distribute it over a wide area such that it prevents erosion.
A French Door refrigerator has a freezer bin at the bottom with the refrigerator compartment above that accessed through two doors. This is as opposed to a side-by-side which have narrow, top to bottom compartments for both.
Sounds like you’re well informed and not just being taken for a ride like what we saw with our down the street neighbors, but let me close this one with one question. When we’re talking about sewer repair and replacement, who doesn’t have existing pipe? I’m trying to figure out what’s different about my existing pie situation vs. yours.I very much don’t want to go the cheap route if there’s some longer term downside.
Our house was built in 1904. The original sewage went to a cesspool. In the 1920s, there was piping put in, but back then that meant concrete pipe, which is far from ideal because the surfaces are not smooth, which means things like TP hang up and cause clogs. The piping in the house was originally cast iron. When the house was flipped in 2004, the contractor dug up the sewer line and married ABS ( Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) pipe to the existing cast iron sticking out from under the foundation. He then fed ABS through the old concrete pipe to avoid having to dig it up. Since the concrete pipe had succumbed to earth pressures over the years, this wasn’t ideal and resulted in reverse slope on the drain pipe (a Very Bad Thing in plumbing).
When ABS is installed nowadays, the contractor is supposed to lay a wire on top of the pipe prior to backfilling. This allows a sonar scanner to find the pipe in the future if repairs are needed.
Since our sewer line exits the rear of the house, that means we have about 60-80’ of sewer line that goes along the back of the house, turns 90 degrees and then goes along the entire length of the property to get to the street. Much as I would like to change that and have the sewer exit at the front of the house, it would involve digging up the basement floor, the crawl space and a goodly chunk of the front yard, and then repairing it all; along with spending more money than the damn house is worth.
Oh god. That is about a thousand percent worse than my imagination allowed.
The situation I had in mind was what happened just up the street. Our neighbor had a clog, and the emergency rooter guys talked them into a replacement at somewhere between 3x and 4x the average cost for a trench less replacement for similar houses on the street. I assumed there might be a little of that going on here, and wow, was I wrong.
A house we bought in the 90’s had a very tall pine tree in the front. 2 months into being there a wind storm uprooted the decades old tree by the roots and it crashed through the roof and destroyed the dinning room. 32K in damage.
The company that did the repairs (a very reputable company otherwise) neglected to replace the air vents in the roof. We ended up with large amounts of black mold in the attic.
They treated the attic and repaired the roof properly. But by that time the insurance company had dropped us for the large claims in such a short period of time.
Fuck all insurance companies. Rapacious, unreliable, and will do most anything to avoid paying out a claim. And two of my kids work for one of them; oh, the shame.
Well, seeing this happened in 1998 I’d say were well off.
Problem was they classified this as 3 claims rather than just 1 big one.
They had moving the tree as one, fixing the house as two, then the mold repair as the third. What a crock if shit. The mold repair was the company fixing it’s screw up.
When we built our house many years ago we foolishly designed the kitchen such that the stove was on an inside island. There was no thought of or provision for a hood. We “solved” that by installing a Jenn-aire downdraft stove. The vent is exhausted through the bottom and passes through the cellar. The first Jenn-aire lasted a long time. The current Jenn-aire takes an hour or more to preheat when we try to use the oven. We’ve spent hundreds trying to get it fixed with no success. And to replace it today would be almost 4K! NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, put in a downdraft stove cause there’s only one company in the business and they have become notoriously unreliable.
Holy moley, that’s a long time. I’ve heard of ovens that had one of the two elements stop working and it was noticed when it took longer to pre-heat but it was no where near an hour.
I omitted one very important piece of information - this is a gas model. There are no electrical heating elements, just gas valves that need to open a certain amount based on temperature chosen. Sorry for any confusion.
Sorry to hear this, @Chefguy. No idea what prevailing rates are there but it sounds high to me—I’m in Dallas TX metro, FWIW. Much as Mrs. L and I adore the architecture and craftsmanship of older homes, this sort of thing always scares me away. Hope it all turned out ok.
Our appeal to the city for financial relief because of their fuck-up was denied. I’m just thankful that we could afford to take the financial hit. What the hell do people do who don’t have anything in the bank? Second mortgage?