Ah, the joys of owning a 60 year old house.

Ug… Well, we’re glad the seller offered us a home warranty! Our main sewage line had some blockage going on this last week… We called our warranty peoples and they sent out a plumber from their network… Poor guy, it was rainy, cold, nasty outside & he ended up finding the plumbing clean-out access was about 2 feet UNDER OUR DECK in the back yard! Silly deck builders..
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Anyhow, he was here for about an hour & essentially gave up. He told Melisa that his cable wasn’t long enough (he had 100 feet!!!) to get to the stoppage & we’d have to find some one with a 120 foot clean-out snake. Um… The clean-out access is in the back yard… The utilities easement is the back 4 feet of our back yard which is only maybe 60-70 feet away!!! I think he was just miserable trying to work under the deck & just came up with an excuse to get out of here.

So we called our warranty peoples back and they told us we’d have to just find & pay a plumber to do the work, then they’d reimburse us for the charges. Melisa found some one from the Shepherd’s Guide and not only did they say the previous guy is off his rocker with that excuse, but they came right out (also stating that we’d need to cut out access through the deck to the clean-out pipe.)

So I hurried home & cut a handful of our decking planks to be able to pull them up to access the clean-out pipe & they got the job done with the same basic equipment the previous plumber had… I will say that I would not have wanted to work that equipment while lying on my belly under the deck though, so I’ll give him that much.

Anyhow, we’re back to flushing out toilet and taking showers without also wading in ankle deep waters.

Ah, the joys of owning a 60 year old house.

Oh, while I’m on the subject of plumbing, apparently when some one did some of the remodeling around here they decided to add in a new clean-out pipe. They also decided that since the new washer & dryer hookups were pretty close to the old cast iron clean-out that they’d just run some PVC pipes out from the wall & just dumping the water into the old clean-out pipe!

Yes that white stuff around the pipe on the ground is used toilet paper (well, not the big tag, but the gray-ish colored stuff all around the pipe) stuff … Apparently when our “facilities” we’re draining out to the sewage system, it found an alternate source of relief here… I asked the plumber if that set-up would be considered “normal”… He just scratched his head to figure out what was going on there & just kinda laughed. Apparently, it’s not the “best” method to drain our plumbing down the old clean-out access…

I figured it works well enough (when our main sewage line isn’t blocked up), so I’m going to leave it this way until spring & I’ll figure out what I want to do about it then. In the mean time, I’m very glad for all the rain we’ve been having. Could you imagine the stank if it were the heat of summer when this happened!!!