The Joys of Home Ownership

August 18, 2008 · Filed Under Ranting 

This past weekend, Chris and I headed off to Los Angeles to go see a couple bands; Reckless Kelly and Micky & the Motorcars. If you follow my blog you may be saying, “didn’t you just see these guys last weekend?” The answer would be “Yes, yes we did.” But that’s for another blog post coming later. For now, let’s get back to the story at hand…

Chris picked me up at work and we head straight to the 15 freeway. We are about 1 hour in to our trip when we get a phone call from Chris’ sister-in-law, Tara, who is staying at our house for a few weeks. It seems the the toilet in the downstairs bathroom has backed up and had continued running while she was upstairs for a while. By the time she found the problem, our downstairs bathroom, hallway, bar area and guest bedroom are soaked. She had turned off the water to the toilet and was in the process of cleaning up the mess with the help of my mother-in-law. Since there wasn’t much we could really do over the weekend anyway, we continued on our trip.

Saturday morning we got another call. My mother-in-law’s garage flooded. Apparently the washing machine overflowed and filled up a portion of the garage with water. Tara went over to help her clear out the boxes and clean up the mess. After she was done helping, she came back to our house and went upstairs to take a shower. When she headed back downstairs, all the water from the shower had come up through the floor drain in the downstairs shower and caused another minor flood. So back they went to cleaning up the mess.

We called the plumbers and set up an appointment for Monday morning. When they arrived, the first thing they did is tried to run the snake down the toilet. The pipes were clear and they found no blockage. They snaked the shower and again found no blockage. The next step was to check the main pipes in the front yard. The started running the snake and couldn’t get too far. Unfortunately it wasn’t a blockage, it was actually a broken pipe.

When they dug out the area, it appears that there was a leak that was keeping the dirt wet. This was causing it to continue to settle and was building up a gap. Then, at some point a piece of concrete slipped and fell on to the PVC pipe below and busting it. This started to let in dirt and rocks. As more and more dirt built up, it started causing the backup and before long, we have a big problem.

It’s weird to say, but we were actually pretty lucky. The broken pipe was real close to wear they started digging. If it hadn’t been, they would have needed to bring in a back-hoe to dig up our front yard until they found the broken pipe before they could even fix it.

Once they had the pipe fixed they had us fill both bath tubs and then drain them at the same time to make sure there was no leaks and that everything was flowing smoothly. When that all turned out OK, they put the dirt they had dug up back in the hole. The only problem is, so much of the dirt has either gone down the drain or been compacted in to the ground, the amount they dug up only filled about half the hole. I need to go to Home Depot and pick up 4 or 5 bags of sand/dirt to fill the hole back up and then deal with the rocks on top, etc…

You can see photos of the mess over at flickr.

ahh, good times.

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