I call this pic Still Life With Tools, and it's a fitting start to a summary of day 6 of our saga, as tools hiding from the rain piling up on the kitchen counter were typical of the day the rain fell. And fell. And fell.
I gather that on this particular day that more rain fell in that single day than it had on that date ever. Or for many years anyways. And it was a soggy one. Day 6 can be summed up in a single word: MUD.
I really felt for the guys working out in our yard. I believe this is Carl the plumber in the trench, with Joe the bossman-plumber alongside. What was already mucky clay turned to the stickiest mud I think I have ever seen. A short walk and you could gain 10 pounds simply in the weight of the mud on your shoes. Imagine all those waders and such! What you see in the pic above is our new cleanout for the sewer, also called an "I see" for reasons that I can no longer remember. But it was a glorious thing to have installed. Now, all they had to do was connect the sewer to the new line that had been run through the crawl space. Below is looking at the clean out from the other side (which required me to stand in the mud, hence my knowledge of the stickiness factor)... This was the part that required jackhammering into the house:
That's Joe the bossman-plumber above. Don the plumber must have been camera shy that day, but he was around. Heck, he practically lived at the house for a week..... The good news is that they eventually got it all hooked up, and all that remained to do was clean up. Now clean up is an understatement, if there ever was one... These are my muddy shoes:
There was so much mud that even with the plumbers being careful, there were little mud paths, wet and dry across most of the floors in the house, I'm sure of much of it from me. It was a night in which all the towels in the house were laid down to provide a clean way to walk from one room to the other. Oh, and the other great thing that happened on day 6 is that they (aka Carl the plumber) put in the line for a new toilet in our laundry room. As in second toilet. As in thank god, there will be another place to pee in this house!
So, progress was really being made at this point, and I actually believed there would be plumbing again soon. I wasn't sure if it would get hooked up that night or not, but in the end, it did get fixed and I was able to have a shower, a nice long one at home. Nice, that is, if you ignored the fact that they bathtub still would not drain, as was, in fact, worse than ever. Despite lots of new pipes everywhere under the house... Oh well... Would have to talk to the plumbers about that in the morning. And I settled in for the night....To see what happened on day 7, click here.
2 comments:
I give your plumbers a standing ovation! That shows dedication to their work and to their customers. They could have stopped working if they wanted to because of the rains, but they wanted to be sure that your water problems would be fixed as soon as possible. So even in the bad weather and the thickening mud, they kept on working. It’s that sort of dedication and drive that makes for admirable, successful people. I hope all their efforts paid off, and have prevented any future problems since they finished working.
I think that it will be the best post about plumbing ever.
Brooklyn Plumbers
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