The Sewer, Again

So, our brand-spanking-new sewer line started backing up. It started the day we did 3 loads of laundry and ran the dishwasher twice, so we thought that we had just overloaded the system. Except in the coming days and weeks, it took less and less to get a backup, and eventually we noticed that there was (brace yourself) toilet paper outside in the stairwell, having washed up from the drain. Luckily, that was the ONLY visible evidence of grossness. Then, eventually, it got to be that one load of laundry did it, and by Thanksgiving flushing the toilet a few times in not-so-rapid succession did it too.

We had a guy out on Saturday after Thanksgiving to rot out the line. He got a 4" and 6" spinny cutter head through, but it was still, in industry terms, "peanut butter." He wanted to come back later and shoot a high-pressure jet of water through to clear the line so he can camera it. Oh, and that'll be $800, on top of the $200 (at a discount, because it didn't work!) that the day's rotting cost.

I had been planning on taking Monday off work, but the guy could only come out on Tuesday so I sadly trudged to work on Monday and took Tuesday off. Well, come Tuesday, the machine is broken so he can't come. Argh! Remembering that our realtor, Agnes, had reccommended a plumber, I said let's just call these guys and if they can come today, let's do it.

When I called them, the owner was very suspicious about the jetting, and asked if I had been dealing with a reputable plumber, because jetting seemed an extreme way to solve to problem to him. He said he'd call his supervisor, who would contact the teams and then get back to me as to whether they could come out. The supervisor called, and was equally mystified by the jetting. He said they could probably get some guys out in the afternoon, which they did.

The guys were able to use their camera and do some cutting, discovering that there was a giant clump of roots right where the new pipe left off, under the sidewalk. (The city takes over on the other side of the sidewalk, natch.) They were able to cut through the roots, and reccommended a root-killing something-or-other that you put down your drains every 3 months or so to, uh, kill roots.

Laundry-doing, dish-washing, long shower-taking, and toilet-flushing recommenced, and there was much rejoicing.

New Lamp

Hey look, we bought a lamp!

We were starting to feel the effects of winter in Chicago, especially since the first floor gets virtually no natural light, thanks to ill-placed trees and a big porch.

The Most Interesting Thing

Jason comes down from the attic.

"I've found it."

"What?"

"The most interesting thing we will ever find in this house."

"What?"

I Am Glad We Fixed the Drains

So, it turns out we have had ourselves some flooding here in the windy city. Luckily, we had our clogged-solid outside drain pipe replaced during the great basement digout.

Apparently our yard is low ground and every backyard and alley in the neighborhood drains into it.

I do not have the patience to rotate this video right now, but here's what our back stairs looked like in motion:


Rain from L. B. on Vimeo.

The Pit of Despair

Our drains were running kind of slow, and the house had been empty for about a year, so we decided to get the sewer line roto-rooted and the drains snaked. No big deal. Right?

The guys are down in the basement for a while, and Paul, the guy in charge, wants me to come down and look at some things. Uh. This can't be good.

And it isn't. For starters, the catch basin is caving in. What the hell is a catch basin, you ask? Basically, it's your own personal little sewer. Back in the day, when people used unholy amounts of grease to cook with, it was a city ordinance in Chicago that you must have a catch basin between your kitchen sink and the city sewer, so that all your yucky grease could go there instead of into Lake Michigan. It's a little shaft covered with a manhole cover in our crawlspace that, when uncovered basically looks like a miniature well out of a fairy tale. Except with grease.

So, our catch basin is caving in, which is bad. But, the city no longer requires people to have them, which is good. So we can just fill it with rock, reroute the drain on the kitchen sink, and call it a day. Woohoo!

But. The sewer line. They aren't able to get their little whirring cutter machine thing through the sewer pipe, let along clean it out. In fact, it takes 2 guys pulling on it to extract it from the pipe. It was only about 3 feet in (it's supposed to go all the way to the street, about 20 feet). Part of the reason they are having trouble getting the cutter through is that the terra cotta pipes are cracked. Yes, our sewage pipe was cracked and broken and leaky. I'll let you think about that for a while, and what it means. Sewage. Cracked. Leaky.

Paul is amazed we are able to flush out toilets without backing up the line, and makes me feel that every flush is a round of Russian roulette, only with water and sewage instead of bullets. Regardless of how dire this situation actually was (god only knows, this guy ended up being perhaps half a step above a used car dealer in terms of trustworthiness), we felt it was a worthwhile investment to get the sewer line replaced, so that we could flush wantonly and free of care.

Three day job, no big deal, in and out, no interruption in service except for about an hour and a half while the joints seal. Great! They would also end up replacing the line from the gutter and two floor drains, one in the basement and one in the crawl space. And, remove the ancient disgusting concrete utility sink and install a new one, and put in a water filter since Jason was a little twitchy about the lead pipe. These last tasks were not in the bid, and were off the books, for $300 (including materials). Did a red flag go off in your head just now? It should have.

You would think that digging a giant trench in someone's basement would be a job for some kind of machine, or possibly a team of strapping young men. You would be wrong. It is a job for small-but-muscular man in his late 40's. Luckily, said man lived only 2 blocks away, so when the rest of the crew was gallivanting around at other jobs or taking their mother to the airport (seriously), he was around to actually work on our effing basement.

The days dragged on, and while the piles of dirt got bigger, our pipes were not more connected or less leaky. At on point, most of the pipes were disconnected, and were more or less draining into the ditch. This was understandably disturbing to us, so Jason slapped a patch together so that at least most of the drainage went into the pipes. Paul kept feeding us bullshit about why the job wasn't done yet, but as far as we can tell they just had too much work going on, Paul had family in town so wasn't around to work/supervise, and nobody but us really cared if we could flush our toilets or drain our sinks into something other than a giant pit in our basement.

Eventually, on day 6 of the 3-day job, everything is replaced, sealed, filled-in, inspected, and paved over. Our new utility sink is installed, sort of, and the washing machine drains into the sewer instead of the sink.

However. The toilet upstairs is (unusably) clogged, and the shower still drains slow; though Paul promised up and down that he would snake all the drains, clearly he did not. There is no p-trap on the washing machine drain, so if/when the sewer gets really stinky, the stench could go right up the pipe and make our clothes sewerlicious. The faucet on the utility sink leaks badly, and the levers are installed backwards. The water filter, clearly left over from a different job, is not installed, which doesn't really matter because it doesn't remove lead, only rust and sediment. What was it we wanted the filter for? Oh yeah, to remove lead. Argh! I'm getting all angried up just thinking about it. All this comes on the heels of Jason calling these people nearly every day, asking "....sooooo, when's it going to be done?" and getting lame excuse after lame excuse.

Finally, the day after we could reliably flush, when they didn't call or come by to finish the work, we decided to take a "screw you" approach to it, and write off the work that was owed us. Sigh. Jason ended up calling a 24-hour plumber to come and get the toilet and shower on track, and fix the leaky sink downstairs. $300 later, everything was functioning. This is a terribly anti-climactic ending, but let me tell you, boring is exactly what you want when it comes to your sewer line.

Before/After: Stairs

Oh Stairwell. First, your good qualities. You're open, reasonably. This is a surprisingly difficult thing to come by in Chicago. Many houses have scary narrow steep stairs that are tucked into what you'd think was a closet. So this open stairwell, while sort of hideous, is something of a find in a smaller house.



Now, the bad qualities.

We'll start with the obvious: paneling. Ugh. Then, the railing. I am willing to concede that the railing is not in and of itself universally horrible. We just don't like it; we're into wood and old-timey things, not poorly-executed wrought iron.

That brings us to the wallpaper. Because this wallpaper has (had) a shiny surface to it, it's pretty much impenetrable by water, including that expelled in vapor form by my steamer. So to get it off, I had to peel off the layer of shiny, then soak the paper backing, than peel that off. Which then left a thick coating of 30 year old paste. This involved much scrubbing, sanding, and cursing. I'd say about in equal parts. No, probably more cursing. And then at the end of the scrubbing, we decided that perhaps the best thing to do is to put more wallpaper up. Really? Yes. I can't believe it, either.

And lastly, the carpet. Looking at photos of the before, it is tempting to say that the photo-carpet looks better than the real-life current stairs. Why? Because the photo-carpet is clean and smooth, while the real-life wood is kind of crappy looking. I call this the "things that look shitty in real life often look good in photos" effect.

However.

I was unprepared for what was under the carpet. Clearly, at one point there had been a runner. And, someone had inexplicably painted the trim and floor off-white, up to where it was covered by the runner. And even more inexplicably, a later person made the move from off-white to lime green. Oh yes. That's right, lime green. Trim. I'll wait here until the nausea passes. Better now? Good, because we stripped and painted the hell out of those stairs, and they look much better (photo coming soon...).

Fire In The Hole

Earlier this evening some kind of something was going on, it sounded like 5 or 6 fire trucks/police cruisers were going through the neighborhood. For some reason, in my head the scenario plays out that something crazy happened to a neighborhood kid, and the police come knocking on my door to find out if I noticed anything, and ask why I myself didn't call the police a la Kitty Genovese. And I say to the cops, "If I called you people every time I heard a kid screaming around here your phone would never stop ringing." Because my fictional self is now officially an old lady.

So I was already cantankerous when I heard a kid yelling "Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!" from what sounded very close by, even taking into account that our porch is only about 5 feet from the sidewalk. I go downstairs to find a kid in my minuscule front yard, near where the sewer guys neglected to put the lattice back under the porch. Making it very much like a hole. Do I go outside? Will yelling at the kids just make them do worse things? Like perhaps actually set fire to my porch? This one looks small enough (maybe 6 or 7?) to actually get freaked out by an adult. But what if he is the smallest of the herd, and brings back reinforcements? By the time I have run through all these possibilities, the kid is thankfully gone and down the street with the rest of them, and there appears to be no smoke. But now all I want to do is yell "You kids get off my lawn!" and spray them with the hose.

I guess we'll have to look into getting a fence put back up...