|
Happy
Birthday, hoe, hoe, hoe!
May 25-27, 2006
I was away on a sales trip when I got a call from Diana telling
me that poop was coming up from the shower drain. That is not a good sign. Barry
was staying over and he said that we had a serious problem. He was right.
When I got home, I called Scott Tipton, the plumber who
installed the tankless water heater, and asked him to come over. He did. Because we
couldn't find the cleanout (which turned out to be in the back
of the house behind a plant stand) Scott dug down and installed a
cleanout for the house. We called a friend of his and proceeded to chew the end
off an auger sewer cleaning snake. This is also not a good sign. Next, we called
around to see how much it would take to fix and got estimates between $11,000
and really expensive, most of which was to dig the hole and find the pipe.
I decided to do it myself over the Memorial Day Weekend since I
only had to rent the backhoe for one day and got three days to use it. I also
rented a concrete saw and started to dig the hole after reading backhoe
instructions on the Internet, (The rental place doesn't give
you instructions or ask if you know what you're doing. Wheeeeee!!!) and
after Damian and Tim yanked up the concrete slab and dug most of the hole.
Three days later, after destroying most of Diana's garden, we
had a hole, as well as a whole lot of dirt. We found the sewer pipe buried under
the old walkway and fixed the problem. It was a lot of fun and we only did $200
in uninsured damage to the backhoe but we saved $7,000 in the process!
(As usual, click on the little
picture to see the big picture.)
| 
