It Just Gets Better

Sooooooo....

Yeah.

We thought the cell phone made it safely through the toilet, because everything seemed to be working just fine.

But, (there's always a "but", isn't' there??) there was water in our basement this morning when we went down to put away the Christmas decorations, (hey, it's not like we waited till the fourth of July!) Could the cell phone have backed up our whole sewage line out of the house? It was such a tiny, sleek little thing! It didn't seem likely.

The plumber came to the rescue and snaked the line out of the house, and seemed to clear the blockage. but just to make sure, he ran a scope through. We did locate my phone. It had made it almost all the way to the street! but long before we got to the street, we found the source of the problem: at our foundation, the pipe out joins with another pipe, and that pipe is pretty much crushed. It still connects slightly with the house, but it is shifted, so that much of our exiting waste water is actually pushed into the ground around the pipe near our foundation. We don't know when or how this could have happened. It might have been like that since construction, gradually getting worse, or maybe the ground shifted and caused it more recently.

So now we know why we have an overactive sump pump - the waste pipe is about 4 feet away from the sump well. Pretty gross, huh? We've been pumping this slightly filtered waste water through our sump pump into the garden under the front walkway. My mom said "no wonder your flowers always look so nice!"

So, you might ask, what would it take to fix such a little problem? Well... the pipe exits the foundation under the basement floor. That's about 8 feet below ground. There will need to be adequate access to the area. That will require a backhoe. Tomorrow. Fun, huh? We might lose some trees and will definitely lose some of my beautiful red twig dogwoods. My husband said, "don't cry - we don't need any more water in the house!"

And to icing the cake - until this is finished we can't use our bathrooms, and should limit the water we run down the drains.

So tomorrow we'll be showering at the rec center. Good thing it's close!

How's your Sunday going?!