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.