Friday, the Shiteenth

Friday, the 13th marked our sixth day of plumbing issues. No one was happy, and I was extremely... uncomfortable... as I waited for the plumbers to arrive at 9:00 a.m. I mentioned the "healthy turds," but did I mention that I'm also very "regular." That "regular" time is somewhere in the 7:00-9:00 am block of time, generally speaking, and there was nowhere to go to the bathroom without going door to door asking to use one of the neighbors' bathrooms. No, I didn't do that!
Fortunately for everyone else in my family, they all had somewhere else to go off to to take care of business.

Let me fill in some details here while we wait for these plumbers to show up, okay?
"My" plumber is a guy who owns his own company. He's mostly a one-man show in a van, though he does sometimes have a guy who works with him. When he suggested "calling in the big guns," he recommended a larger company, a company that has a lot of plumbers working for it. More equipment and all of that jazz. The guy they sent out to do the estimate on Thursday was their No. 2 guy.
Yes, seriously, that's what the woman I spoke told me when I called, "We're sending you our number two guy."
He did the estimate but, he told me while he was here, he would not be the one to come on Friday to do the repair. He was going to be unavailable. The guy who was coming out, with his assistant, was somewhere farther down the chain.

9:30 arrived but there were no plumbers.

They finally showed up at something like 9:47. No, I wasn't watching the clock!
Not exactly.

The guy comes in and looks over the situation. He wants to get under the house to look at the pipes which is a whole separate challenge, because, guess what, there's no access point to under our house from outside the house. What kind of crazy is that? The only way to get under our house is through a trap door in the closet in my daughter's room, so I had to clean out the bottom of her closet so that the guy could stick his head down there and look around for two minutes. Yeah, she wasn't happy with me for that.

The end result of all of this was to tell me that the guy who made the estimate was wrong and that the job couldn't be done except to do it this other way which... basically, he wanted to double to triple the cost of the high end of the original estimate. Which makes me wonder how much of that he gets to keep personally, because he sold it hard. But fuck that! None of what he was saying aligned with anything that "my" plumber had said and certainly didn't go along with what the No. 2 guy had said. Needless to say, I was angry.

I called the company with the intention of speaking with the owner only to find that the guy was already on the phone with the owner. So I asked the woman about what the guy was saying, about it being an impossible job, and whether it was impossible or just impossible for him. In short, was it outside of his skill set? She said, actually, it was entirely within his skill set; he just didn't want to do it. She told me that she would have the owner call me when he got off the phone the shitty plumber who was trying to scam me. But he never called...

I'm assuming that some sort of communication happened between the owner and the woman I had spoken with because, a few minutes later, shithead comes back in and tells me they'll do it for the original estimate, the high end of it, but, still.

Anyway, it was after 11:00 a.m. before any actual work started on the 9:00 a.m. appointment time after all of the shenanigans.

Which almost brings us to the end of this tale. They did get everything fixed by 5:00. -ish. Because it was actually 5:30 before the guy with the shitty attitude left because he tried to pull another set of shenanigans before leaving, but he lost that one, too, because I walked up on him on a phone call with the owner during which he was lying about things that had been said but, when he saw me, he had to quit lying and do what was agreed to.

The other thing of note has to do with what the previous occupants of our house DIYed our plumbing into. Remember how I said we had no clean out? As it turns out, we did have a clean out; it was just buried under a paving stone going into the backyard. Also, it was no good.
Look:

I'm realizing I should have labeled this drawing. heh
The vertical pipe there is the main sewer line running down to the street. The curved pipe with the arrows is the line coming out from under our house. What I want to call your attention to is the other "pipe" with the rings around it. That's not an underground pipe at all. That's the drain pipe from our roof gutter. That pipe is just inside the gate to the backyard, and, I'm assuming, that area would flood during our winter rains. I don't actually know, because the previous occupants attached a sheathe to the end of the pipe (the striped bit in the drawing) and tied it into the sewer line. Totally out of code, of course, which the plumber happily pointed out to me when they discovered what had been done.

So, see, the previous occupants dug up the sewer line, added a clean out (the circular "cap" at the top of the drawing) which only runs in the direction to the street and DUCT TAPED the gutter drain into the sewer line. I have to assume that the clean out was in case roof debris stopped up the sewer line, which has never happened to us, but I can see the danger in what they did. For us, though, the sewer line block was up under the house and the clean out we had there completely unusable. The plumbers had to take all of that out and put in a new line with a clean out that would both go under the house and down to the street. The gutter drain now drains into the yard like normal gutters do and, since it rained a few days after all of this was done, I got to experience the standing water just inside the gate. And there's no paving stone there, now, either, because that's where the new clean out is.

You know, if it's not one problem, it's some other problem, but at least we have draining water in our house again. Right?

It's Been a Shitty Week (keep waiting for it...)

Let me back my story back up a bit.
My house doesn't (didn't) have a "clean  out" for the sewer line. It's a convenient access point outside of a house that a plumber can use to run their snake-thing into your sewer line to unclog it. It makes unclogging a sewer line something that takes no more, generally speaking, than half an hour. Most houses have them and all houses should but, of course, mine did not. So, on Monday, when the plumber had been out to clear our sewer line, his 20-minute job turned into something that took more than two hours and didn't really work, anyway, because he had to use his small snake that would fit down the sink pipe rather than the big one he could have run directly down into the sewer line through a clean out. A good portion of that time was spent trying the small snake in different locations trying to find one that would work to reach the blockage.

Thursday morning, when the plumber arrived to, again, clear the sewer line -- Or, actually, clear it at all, because it wasn't a new blockage but the same one resealed. He had only put a hole or something in it with his small snake and, now, that hole was plugged, too -- he went straight to the access point in the sink, that being the only one that really worked. We both thought this was going to be a quick and easy process now that he knew where to go in.

Let me just remind you of the state of things when the plumber got there:
There was a "healthy turd" floating in the toilet. It was not stopping up the toilet because the toilet hadn't flushed. There was a tiny amount of water standing in the bathtub, but it wasn't enough to even reach both sides of the tub. The other bathroom seemed normal: no water in the tub and a normal level of water in the toilet. That's how things were when the plumber arrived.

Here's the thing:
Since we both expected this to be a relatively quick and easy job, I went off to work on some stuff I needed to do. I was not actually a witness to what happened next.

However, I knew things were going poorly when the cursing began. A lot of cursing. I know two things:
1. At one point, the plumber resorted to "mad plunging." Or, maybe, "furious plunging" is a better way to put it. Have you ever done that? I have not. On the occasions when I need to use a plunger, I go with a very slow and steady pace. If you go too fast, the toilet water can splash up out of the toilet and the thought of being splashed with toilet water, even "clean" toilet water, makes my skin crawl. [My wife says I have... issues.] This is what caused the "shit explosion" in the bathroom because, yes, indeed, toilet water had gone... well, there were pieces of turd... Look, you can imagine it, okay. It was horrifying, to say the least.
2. When he was through, both bathtubs were about 1/3 full of brown sewage water, but the bathtub in my wife and my bathroom also was full of thick poop sludge. Oh, and both toilets were full to the top. Where did all of this water come from? It boggles my mind.

Look, I get that it got drawn up out of the sewer line at some point in whatever he was doing, but it didn't go back down! At all! For two days! Whhhyyy?!?! I mean, it came from somewhere, right? Why didn't it drain back down into the line? Unless he somehow sucked the blockage up, too. I don't know!

And the smell... Okay, we're not going to talk about the smell.

After the furious plunging episode, the plumber came to me and said, "Andrew, I can't do this anymore." I think my brain might have switched off at that point. I just... I mean...
It was a matter of degree, the degree the problem had escalated from whatever he had done. All I could think was something along the lines of, "What the fuck am I supposed to do about this?"

Remember (last post), my wife and I had an opera to go to that night. I needed to do some laundry, and I needed to take a shower.

He went to explain that the next thing for him to do would be to "pull a toilet" so that he could get a bigger snake down in the sewer line.
[Do I really need to explain the mechanics, here? How both toilets were full up and all of that water/poop sludge would have to go somewhere, including all of the water from the tubs. It would take him all day to get all of that water out of the house even if he had somewhere to put it, and that would be before pulling the toilet and cleaning the sewer line.]
I needed someone with "bigger guns" than him. And more men. It wasn't just a one-man job anymore.

My brain was still at, "What the fuck am I supposed to do about this?"

So he left...

Needless to say, I did not get any laundry done or take a shower before the opera. Oh, and my kids were super pissed at not being able to run any water all night while we were gone. Oh, yes, we still went to the opera; we had the tickets, but the opera is another story altogether. However, at the time, we were looking forward to it as a pleasurable break from the shit storm at our house.

Oh, what did I do about the sewer line? I called someone else, of course.
They sent someone out to do an estimate because it was too late in the day for anything else. The new guy suggested having a clean out put in. This was turning into a very expensive clog! But the cost from these guys to clear the sewer line was almost three times as much as my plumber and, if the line got clogged again, say, the next week, we'd have to pay that full price again.

But this is where I feel kind of bad, because I could have had my plumbing guy install the clean out -- we'd talked about it -- but we'd decided against it because this was the first sewer line clog we've had the whole time we've lived here. He figured it was an aberration and that we didn't need to spend the money on it. Considering the state of things as I was talking to the new guy on Thursday afternoon, I opted for the clean out.

If only it had been that easy...