When we made an offer on the house one of the repairs we asked for was to have the sewer replaced. It was cracked in multiple places, had weeds growing in it and overall was a nasty situation.
The work kept being pushed out for multiple reasons so we ended up closing on the house with the sellers paying for the repair in full. It was risky and I wouldn’t say we felt great about it, but the week following closing the sewer was replaced and all went as planned. Except for that it didn’t.
I was fascinated by the process. Instead of removing the old pipe they shoved a new pipe in the old one so it was less invasive on the yard and could be complete within the day.
It was still quite a project with excavators, town workers, equipment and so much more. I made good friends with the project manager so he let me take lots of photos and he would come tell me to get my camera when something exciting was happening. And I mean, I’m sure a sewer replacement isn’t very exciting to most people but I’m easily amused.
So all went well, they completed the project in a day, the town inspected it and they were on their merry way.
Until the next morning, which was Saturday, when Al when to the basement with our friend and one of the rooms was flooded. WITH TOILET WATER. It took me about .2 seconds to get my friend the project manager on the phone and he was at our house within the hour.
Turns out his crew hadn’t properly capped the old pipe. So every time we flushed the toilet it was basically flushing into the basement. Apologies if this is TMI. Just keeping it real up in here. Luckily the crack was only big enough to let liquids through. IF ya know what I mean…
His crew was great though. They came right out, fixed the problem, had their restoration crew out to clean, power wash and sanitize and everything was fine by Monday. They ran dehumidifiers through the weekend, which was a huge help as well. We’re just thankful that we hadn’t already started work on the basement floors, because I mean that would have sucked if we had needed to redo them all.
So in the end it could have been worse, and truthfully we needed to run a dehumidifier in the basement at some point anyway, so it saved us that hassle. How’s that for having the glass half full when your basement was full of toilet water! And this, my friends, is homeownership. You take the good with the bad, right?!
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