On Sunday the pipes in my house backed up into tubs. We had to call out a plumber to see if we could get it fixed.
He first looked for the sewer cleanout near the house. He couldn’t find it. This might be explained by the large pipe that the foundation people threw away when they couldn’t find its purpose. Next the plumber tried cleaning out the pipe from the alley. This seemed to be working pretty well until whatever clogged the pipe broke the motor-driven snake.
He returned on Monday and decided that the pipe was collapsed.
He quoted a price to replace the pipe. This quote was disturbingly close to the down payment for the house.
It seemed like getting some other estimates would be a good idea. I arranged for four other plumbers to drop by and give estimates. One did.
I’ve now learned that 50 feet of plastic pipe costs quite a bit of money.
We have two different sorts of insurance on the house, but the sewer isn’t covered.
Argh, I guess that’s why they call it disposable income.
Oh, and if all goes well, at the rate it is being fixed we should have a new sewer line by this time next week.
We moved into a new house this past summer, and last week muddy water backed up into the downstairs tub. The plumber came out and looked, but couldn’t find a cleanout anywhere. He told me he could remove the downstairs toilet and run the snake through that pipe, then replace the commode, for $150. His other option was removing that toilet and running a sensor through it (also $150) so that he could locate the sewer line in order to install cleanouts in the front yard (usually around $400, he said). I sent him home while I considered my options.
Later that day, I found what looked like a cleanout in a pipe in the garage. Bubbling with joy, I called the plumber, only to have him tell me that was probably an internal line and cleanout, and if it was under 4 1/2 inches he couldn’t use the snake in it. It measures 3 1/2 inches. Damn.
Our pipes aren’t completely clogged, so I just ignored the slow drains and did nothing. Then, last night, I found yet another cleanout-type cap in a strange opening on the back of the house. This one measures at least 4 1/2", so I’m keeping my fingers crossed and planning to call the plumber back on Monday.
The truly frustrating part of all this is that we had to install a new sewer line in our old house some years back, and it cost a mint (it’s not that the pipe was so expensive, but the backhoe sure was). I feel somehow cheated - the friend who bought our old house has visible, easily accessible cleanouts now, and we have a mystery to solve before we can get the tree roots cleaned out of our pipes.
Isn’t home ownership everything you ever dreamed of? We’re not only the kings of our own castles…we get to be the janitors, too.
I am a White, Christian, heterosexual, middle-class male so most of my life goes smoothly. I don’t read Ann Coulter or watch Michael Moore’s movies. I get along fairly well with my relatives because I avoid them. If a cashier takes too long checking me out I start shopping at a different store. I roll my eyes at the antics of politicians but don’t expect much from any of them because I’ve known too many. For the same reason I have even lower expectations of show people so I am more surprised that Charleton Heston or Alec Baldwin can dress themselves than that they sometimes say something stupid. I know life can suck sometimes and I know most problems either go away, kill you, or get supplanted by something worse so I don’t pay much attention to the little problems people like to complain about. In other words, I have difficulty relating to much of what is discussed in The Pit. However,
If all goes well, they might be finished today. Until then, we’re able to joke about having a very narrow lap pool in our backyard.
I’d now like to rant about previous owners of the home and their cheap people they hired in the past. At some point in the house’s history, a second bathroom was added. Rather than conveniently replacing the old sewer with a new one, they just ran two lines together in the backyard. Thy did such a slap happy job of it that the present plumbers nearly missed the second line and almost failed to connect it to the new sewer.
We’ll have to go back and remember why we thought buying a house was such a good idea.
It turns out that the “cleanout” near the house in the backyard really was just a pipe sticking out of the ground.
Which reminded me of one of those great bug monster movies. We have people on a tour of a soon to be built resort in Florida. One couple gets off the tour bus to go look at some pipes sticking out of the ground, because the husband is certain that the pipes aren’t connected to anything. Just has he triumphantly demonstrates that the pipes are indeed attached to nothing, he and his wife are devoured by giant ants. I know how he feels.
