Plumbing Saga: The Final Flush

This is the conclusion to our recent plumbing saga story. To read the previous installment, click here. To go back to the beginning, click here.

Perhaps the best part of the whole saga was that mom didn't realize that we had put in the second toilet as part of the extended project, and she did not find it until 3 days later. My sister and I had gotten all the party favours ready to celebrate yet, still, she never went into the laundry room....
Finally, on about day 10, with company coming (and we wanted them to be able to use the new guest washroom!), we had to "trick" mom into going into the laundry room to make the discovery. We thought she might be mad at this addition to the job (though at this point it was really just thrown in), but she was gloriously delighted! Note the crown for the queen and her throne.

It looks pretty boring here, but this really is the most exciting outcome of the whole thing. Three women with two toilets are much more fun to live with than three women with one toilet. Absolutely!!

The overall clean up is continuing a week along and still not complete, although it's getting better. So far we have a new gate, our neighbors have their fence back, we have new pavement leading up to the back door and some early attempts have been made to get the rest of the backyard in order.

When it all began, we had no idea what would ensue, and I gather the whole thing was the talk of the plumbing and waterworks town, as it really was a drawn out mess, but it is all done now. And I am almost qualified to project manage a plumbing site. Well, almost. For now, I am happy to get to choose where I pee without a line up, and continue sweeping off the dried mud from the stairs....

To read the whole story from the beginning, click here.

Plumbing Saga Day 7: Let the clean up begin!

This is a continuation of our seemingly never-ending plumbing saga. To read the previous installment, click here. To go back to the beginning, click here.

I call this pic Still Life with Muddy Shovel. It is interesting how something so ordinary can seem so beautiful in the morning sun.And I call this one Goodbye Planter! This is looking out the back door to backyard, and this is Corey the city guy carting away a big old planter that got demolished in the process.

This pic is typical of our front yard for many of the days, lots of men, trucks and muddy dirt. This is the pile of dirt that had been hauled out of the backyard by the plumbers for the city to take away. I did not know that when you dig a hole, then fill it in, you have less dirt left over. The absence of compacting apparently. Anyways, all this had to go. Here Corey the city guy and coworker whose name I forget (really, there were soooo many) working under the watchful of eye of Joe the bossman-plumber (who had operated the bobcat to haul all that dirt out to the front yard) and his son Liam the plumber-boy watching on.

Liam was definitely the dashing young plumber in his mini-gear, seen here powerwashing the bobcat. He would later turn his efforts to the back of the house and cleaned off our stone patio. That was one messy job, and despite the awesome job he did, there are still bits of mud around a week later. It's the kind of thing that's hard to fully get rid of...

I asked Liam to take this shot, it is of the city's big machine loading the excess dirt into a dump truck. We sure had a lot of equipment around this house! It caused lots of interest along our quiet street, and even neighbors checking in that everything was ok with my mom. How kind.Inside the house, Carl the plumber replaced the old catchment pipe (?) below the bathtub and, glory be, it not only drained, but there was actually one of those little whirlpools when the water drains out. I'm not sure that has been witnessed in this house before. It was a glorious thing.

Later that day I picked up my mom and sister from the local motel. They returned home to a house that was mostly clean, and a yard that still showed strange evidence of the week that was....

The saga doesn't really end there, but that's the major stuff and, heck, 7 days is long enough to detail. Lol. I have one more little installment on what has transpired since - click here to read it.

Plumbing Saga Day 6: Mud, mud and more mud!

This is a continuation of our plumbing saga. To view the previous installment, click here. To go back to the beginning, click here.

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.

Plumbing Saga Day 5: The Long Night

This is a continuation of our plumbing saga story. To view the previous installment, click here. To go back to the beginning, click here.
The day begain with the rather unusual sight of a bobcat still in our backyard. So much for the 1 day rental.... Maybe, just maybe, things would go better today, they would find the line, fix it and be off. But I didn't get my hopes up too much, as I was starting to get it that wishful thinking was going to have me disappointed, if I wasn't careful.

First to arrive on the scene that morning was Brad, the city guy, sporting another copy of the plan of our property with some handwritten notations. It seems that the city has records that have not yet seen the light of data entry.... Every year the city runs a little camera robot through it's sewer lines, recording data on where there are holes in the line, aka residential hookups. Now that it's Monday morning, he's been into the office, accessed those archives, and found two measurements that give coordinates of sorts (they are distances from two manhole covers, with our connection in between). Not exact, but pretty darn close. I play measuring tape assistant and Brad roughs the ground twice. He then eyeballs the probably line towards our property and marks the spot with where he thinks they will find the line if they dig. I'd say X marks the spot, if only he'd drawn an X....

Talked to my brother the night before and he wondered about just running a brand new sewer line through the crawlspace from the left side of the house to the right side of the house, directly under the laundry room where we were dying to put a second toilet, then straight out to the main sewer line on the easement, making a new connection there. I said I'd ask the plumbers.

When the plumbers arrive, they are pretty pleased to see Brad's marking, saying, "He's usually pretty accurate. I'll bet we find it."

I interrupt there musings to ask about my brother's idea, but before I can get it out, Joe the bossman-plumber says he was thinking the same thing. So that's two smart men with the same idea, so the idea gets advanced. Joe cautions that the city may want to charge for that, so not to get too excited.

Meanwhile Don the plumber gets to work and drives the bobcat back out to the front yard, then around the house and now enters the backyard via the the right hand side of the house, moving well along the new blacktop walkway that had been put in for mom when her driveway was paved a few years back (this pavement is essential to her being able to get her walker around to the door she uses to access the house). as they knock down the fence post closest to the house, and the bucket emerges into view, I figure she isn't going to be using this entrance to the house anytime soon.

Our neighbor Kevin had poked his his head over the fence for an update that morning, laughing a little nervously, knowing that the easement is on his side of the fence, and our project hasn't gone all that smoothly up to this point... I laugh back and wish him happy kayaking, and turn my attention back to "the dig".

Goodbye planter, I say, as the bobcat wipes it out. They'd asked me if I wanted to save any of the plants in it, consulted with my sister, and the verdict was no. So it got creamed. She had a bit of a look of shock on her face when she came outside later though, as there wasn't much left. She had been was thinking that we could rescue the herbs and flowers ourselves after the planter was pushed aside, but that turned out to be the thoughts of the naive. Oh well, live and learn...

At some point Joe tells me that the idea of a brand new connection to the sewer main was dead, as the city would charge alot to do that. Oh. Oh well, it was a good idea. But we went back to plan A, which was finding the existing connection....

"Dig right here," says Joe the bossman-plumber to Don the bobcat-driving plumber...

Once the hole was dug, Don was in there like a dirty shirt (getting a dirty shirt) probing around with a thingy until they found the line. And found it they did. Only thing was, the line was collapsed, almost completely. It was old clay tile that had definitely seen better days. So the bad news was that the sewer line was collapsed. The good news was that the line was collapsed between our property and where the line hooked up with the main sewer line on the easement.

It took me awhile to understand why this we good news, but it meant that the city was going to have to pick up some of the costs. Oh, yeah baby!!!

So the plumbers moved in to dig up that part of the line. That meant that our neighbor's fence was coming down, and their yard was going to meet the wrath of the bobcat. To be clear, this was all on the easement, but one doesn't really think that way of land that's within one's fence once you are used to it. This is Kevin's look of surprise, as he said, "Whoa... we only went kayaking for 2 hours!!!" Good thing that he and his wife Connie are so good natured. We tried to hide the fact that we rather fancied the extra light pouring into our yard with the fence down, but we couldn't resist. Nice neighbourly fun, all made possible by the city promising Kevin to make things right on the easement when they were done.

In the end, the trench was 7 feet deep. This is Cory the city guy poking around. Cory would become as much of a fixture around the house as Joe, Don, Carl, Liam and Brad....

To keep us occupied, or maybe out of their hair, Don the plumber had suggested that we might like to bury a time capsule when the trench was closed. Cool!!! Sissy and I had great fun gathering things. This was a feature about 150 years of Victoria history. Other items we include were: a Red Bull container, Lipton's Chicken Noodle Soup, liquid tea, Olympic momentos, stamps, a few coins, Purex hand sanitizer, Magic Erasers and various other bits from the junk drawer.

The dig did keep on rather a long time, and at one point we were forbidden from any flushing. We eventually went out for a drive, then to the library to kill a few hours (and use their facilities), then to dinner, then came back around 8:30 pm to see how they were doing on their estimate of being connected by 9:00 pm... I left mom and sissy in the car and made my way to the back yard, only to find a large hole, a bevy of tired men, and no connection. Their next best guess was midnight. I said we'd be back then went out to the car. And made a corporate decision and drove to the local Travellodge where I checked in mom and sis for the night. Back to the house to throw some things in a bag for them, back to the hotel to drop the stuff off, took a quick shower using their facilities (yeah!!!) then back to the house.

They were still at it, using big lights, but in the end, Joe the bossman-plumber told the team to call it quits at 10:00, as the next step was to jackhammer into the foundation of the house, and we didn't want any noise complaints. Just as well, I was tired, and I figured I was in for a night of "camping" regardless. So off they went.......

To view what happened on day 6, click here.

Plumbing Saga Day 4: Adventures with Bobcat

This is a continuation of our wee plumbing saga. To read the last installment, click here. To go back to the beginning, click here.

I call this pic Still Life with Buckets. It only hints at the excitement going on behind the house, though there was enough noise and commotion on Sunday to draw the attention of neighbors. We were creating quite the little scene.
Just before that, our bobcat rental had been dropped off. As our plumbers hadn't yet arrived for the day, Keith the equipment delivery guy was obligated to show someone the key functions and safety features to someone. That someone would be me.

It was amazingly easy to handle, though I only swiveled in the driveway, and did not need to be trusted to avoid damaging the house or running into the propane tank. I happily climbed off when Don the plumber arrived, but gotta share the coolest picture: the fast/slow indicator on the bobcat. Isn't that super clear, no matter what your language?

To make room for the bobcat down the side of the house, they ripped out our old gate. Goodbye gate. The intention was to put it aside to put it up back up again, but it was so old that it practically disintegrated in their hands. Note the aforementioned propane tank that heats our house. We'll call this the left hand side of the house, as we look out towards the street (this distinction will be important later). And note the girl in the distance... that's me taking pictures from the front yard; this pic would have been taken by my sister looking out the bathroom window. Patient guys, all our picture taking, I must say....

And so the dig began... this is when they got a bit closer to the old septic field.

A moment of contemplation... where to dig next?

"Oh no, no can find sewer", thinks Don the plumber after half a dozen hours of digging with the bobcat, both beside the house and behind the house. Our yard is half dug up, and we are no closer to finding what we are looking for.

Brad the waterworks guy from the City of Sidney had dropped by that morning to give us a copy of what they had on file for our property (by the way, I keep saying "our", but really, to be clear, this is my mom's house! ;-).... From this diagram you can see that there are two sewer lines (indicated by red), one running along the street in front of the house, and another running beside the right hand side of the house (the "other" side), along an easement on our neighbor's house. What is most interesting, I suppose, is the words that say, "Sewer unknown" (you can click to enlarge to read it for yourself... yup, it says unknown for the location of our sewer, never a good sign...).

Brad had been on site a couple of times that day, consulting with Don, to figure out which sewer we were most likely connected to. Apparently it was pretty easy to rule out the sewer main in front of the house. We were, apparently, connected to the sewer main on the other side of the house, meaning that the sewer line ran somewhere across the back of the house.... But just where, became increasingly elusive as the day progressed.

Towards dinnertime, Don admitted defeat (which he did not do easily, saying this was the worst situation he'd ever encountered trying to find a line), and said that if we couldn't get better information in the morning from the city, maybe we should just put in a whole new sewer line out to the street. Well, I guess that's an option. But what's a girl who barely manages toilet plunges to know? The good news was that there are little sewer robot cameras and other devices that can be used underground to find sewer connections, but Don wasn't sure what the city had, or what they could get their hands on. All he knew was that he had gone as far as he could with the blind backyard digging without ripping up our cement slab patio.

This was Liam the plumber-boy having his turn sitting in the bobcat, once it was turned off for the day. He was dying to drive it, and I gather it won't be long until he gets his chance. He is actually planning to become a plumber's apprentice. You are looking at the future owner of Sidney Plumbing. Oh, Liam is also good at finding backyard treasures, having located two balls, one truck and one toy soldier during the dig.

And after a photoshoot on the bobcat after the guys had left (my sister of me, goofing around on the bobcat), we settled into another night of "Leave the flushing to us!" and praying that the morning would bring more answers and, hopefully, a conclusion to our saga... how naive we were...

To learn what happened on day 5, click here.

Plumbing Saga Day 3: Gurgling and Witching

This is a continuation of our little plumbing saga. To read the previous installment, click here. To go back to the beginning, click here.

I call this pic Still Life with Wheelbarrow, and it speaks to the calm before the storm that would soon erupt around it. The wheelbarrow sits just to the left, below the bathroom window. If you've been reading the story so far, then you know what has been happening inside said bathroom. And in our crawl space...
... and I did a silly thing this particular morning: I tempted fate. We had been up only an hour or two when I uttered these words: "My only goal for the day today is to not see any cute plumbers!". Not that I minded cute plumbers, but I didn't want any of them underfoot, and we wanted to enjoy the day and it's functioning plumbing in style.

Dumb move. Less than an hour after that, after my mom went out for the day, all hell broke loose. Or, rather, the sweet silence of the house was broken by gurgling. Yes, gurgling.

Into the bathroom I go, and I looked at a our brand spanking new toilet with surprise: it was "boiling" with great big bubbles every few seconds and making rather grand gurgling sounds....

When I pulled back the shower curtain I noticed that the bathtub had filled with a couple of inches of water and there was black sediment in the bottom. It did not look pretty. And I recalled something Joe the bossman-plumber had said on day 1, "as long as you don't have sewage coming up in your bathtub, then we've solved the problem." Shit. All puns intended.

Looking around, we realized that the problem wasn't isolated to the bathroom. My sister was doing some laundry, and the gurgles were erupting throughout the house. In an old darkroom, when we moved some boxes that were sitting across an unused sink, we found the water rising and gurgling there too. After the great panic of rescuing said boxes - as they contained some of my sister's art!!! - I headed to the phone.

It was a Saturday morning, and it was apparently Don the plumber's turn to respond to emergency calls. It turns out ours qualified as such.
What ensued that overtime day was a rather endless search for the source of the problem, which extended from time on the roof (did you know that residential plumbing systems include a stack that goes up to the roof with a vent? I didn't) running snakes to any number of interesting interventions, all in attempts to find the source of the problem.

The good news is we were able to determine that the source of the problem was not inside the house, but outside. There was a problem in the sewer line outside the house. Now all we had to do was locate that, then we could correct it.

I am speaking of the proverbial "we", of course, as it was Don the plumber and his handy assistant, Liam the plumber-boy (Joe's 13 year old son, plumber in training, who was also on site on day 1 with Carl the plumber), who made this determination.
The bad news was that "we" could not locate that source of the problem outside the house. The pic above is of Don the plumber trying a little old fashioned witching for water (also called dowsing) to see what he could find. It actually worked (and he showed my sister how to do it), and he located the drain pipe from the crawlspace pump where it ran across the backyard. But, alas, he could not find the sewer line leading from our house out to the city sewer.

They did find the old, old septic field though. Better add another 'old' to that... it was old, old, old... and made of clay bricks. "How old are clay bricks?" I asked. "Well, they aren't wooden." said Don. Oh, ok, one step up from wooden bricks meant that the original system was old. I was concerned at first that the tank was still there, but Don assured me that this was common practice, to just seal up the old septic tank and to connect the house to the city sewer when it was installed.

What was also common practice at the time, and apparently permitted due to "grandfathering" was not putting in a clean out. A sewer "clean out", I learned, is an easy spot where plumbers can get into the sewer between a house and the main sewer line to, well, clean it out, from time to time, if needed. And we didn't have one. Or one couldn't be found. Heck, we couldn't even figure out for sure which way the sewer line ran from the house, though Don had his suspicions.

Brad the city waterworks guy was apparently consulted by phone as well, but, alas, no clear picture emerged.

The only thing to do, it seemed, was to get a little backhoe and dig for it. Oh lord, this was going to be expensive, we thought, my sissy and I.... and the next day was Sunday which meant, of course, more overtime. But after much consideration of the options, we figured we didn't really have any, so said, "Let's do it!".

Aside of the black water in the bathtub, not much looked different in the house when my mom arrived home not long after Don and Liam left, and she could barely believe that they had been there all day.

We all settled in for a night of semi-camping "Leave the flushing to us!" was the cheer my sis and I developed to remind our elderly mom that flushing needed to be kept at a minimum (though things were flowing relatively smoothly, so to speak, we didn't want to tempt fate). And wondered what the morning would bring....

To read what happened on Day 4, click here.

Plumbing Saga Day 2: The Bathroom Sink

This is a continuation of my record of our recent plumbing saga. To start at the beginning, click here.

So... we spent the night with a brand spanking new toilet, but no door. Here is a doodle I did that day to illustrate the point (you can click to enlarge for details, if you wish).
You may notice that the doodle says 3 cute plumbers in two days, but if you will recall the story so far, you have only met 2 plumbers (both cute, of course): Carl the plumber, and Joe the bossman-plumber. Will get to plumber 3 shortly, but, for now, the day started innocently enough, waiting for a plumber to turn up and put our bathroom door back on, and to install another pump in our crawl space. Which went well. Carl did the work, and Joe came back to check that all was well. And it was.

A couple of hours later, however, my sister noticed water on the bathroom floor. I couldn't believe it. Upon closer inspection, the water was closer to the sink than the toilet. And when I opened the cabinet door, I found a slop of water down below. As I fished out the contents of the cupboard and dumped everything in the bathtub, I could see that the pipe that drains the sink wasn't exactly attached to the drain pipe below. Hmmm... Fiddled for five minutes to see if it was something easy to reconnect, but nope. So I put in another call to Sidney Plumbing.

"You're not going to believe it Joe, but there is water on our bathroom floor", I said. Enter plumber 3. This time Don the plumber was dispatched to come to our rescue. After catching up on all that had transpired the previous day and that morning, Don fixed up the bathroom sink and wrote us up a bill smaller than the others collected so far (with a joke that it was almost perfect, reading: $123.48), and went on his way.

Yeah, our plumbing problems were done!!! Or so we thought....

To read what happened on Day 3, click here.

Plumbing Saga Day 1: The Geysers

It was an ordinary day when it began. No real sign that anything would be different, but, then again, life is like that. Even to a cat.
This is Maui, our sometimes cat, looking out my bedroom window. I put this picture in to start this story because it speaks to how calm our lives were "before" the plumbing saga began. Little could we know how long it would be until we felt that calm again...

Our house, which is really an old cottage, has only one bathroom. And that bathroom contains, or contained, one rather troublesome toilet. It was not so strange to have to call the plumbers, when our plunging powers were defeated. But it had not been so long since they'd been by to rescue us. Yet....

... when I noticed water on the bathroom floor, I was puzzled, especially when I saw that it appeared to be like little splashes. I crouched down to take a closer look, then flushed.

Imagine my surprise to see litte geysers. Yes, geysers. Rising from the spots on the base of the toilet where the bolts hold it to the floor. Oh dear.

It was time to call Sidney Plumbing to the rescue! Not just for the usual repair, but for the bigger job they had recommended, which was replacing the toilet (a topic which had come up on previous visit, when I talked to them about the possibility of a second toilet).

Well, once we had spec'd the toilet type we wanted, and the colour, and asked it to be the higher model (better for my mom's knees), a small search ensued and it was discovered there was only one on the island. "Let's do it!" I declared, and someone was dispatched to go pick it up before anyone else could snatch it.

The installation went well enough, but the efforts to clear anything else beyond the toilet so that we'd have truly smooth sailing, however, were slow. Lots of snakes and pumping and such. They even took a look in the crawl space.
"Did you know you have about a foot of water in your crawl space?" said Carl the plumber. Oh my. Nope. Didn't know that. Joe the bossman-plumber said that was a lot, especially at this time of year. Silly me, I didn't know that any water was normal, but there you go.

Turns out our pump was broken. If you have a crawl space under your house, you have a pump that sucks the water that collects there (from leaks in the house or from rain), and pumps it out to an area away from the house. This was just the first of many plumbing lessons I would learn over the week that ensused.

Anyways, it was late in the day, and they didn't have one in stock, but they promised to pick one up the next day and be back with it. OK, I said, as there really isn't anything else one can do when you have water in your crawl space... can't just leave it there...

It was about dinner time when we thanked our plumbers and sent them on their way. They as we clammoured to see who would get to use the loo first (actually, we let mom Christen it), we noticed that the door was... in the living room.

We considered phoning them to come back, but knowing they would be back the next day with the pump, we figured we three girls could manage things by calling out, "Going in here" and "All clear" and just pretending we didn't see anything else. By these "three girls" I mean me (51), my sister (57) and my mom (88).

And so concludes day 1 of the saga which, at this point, was not considered a saga at all. If only we'd known.....

To read what happened on Day 2, click here.