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The long and winding pipe

Last Tuesday, after a long day at work and dealing with crabby children, my husband and I decided to go out for dinner without the children. I called my cousin who is my regular babysitter and she came over.

Last Tuesday, after a long day at work and dealing with crabby children, my husband and I decided to go out for dinner without the children. I called my cousin who is my regular babysitter and she came over. My daughter, very excited to see her, took her downstairs to show her our new bathroom which was mostly finished and had just been painted. My cousin came upstairs quickly to tell me that there was a lot of water in the basement.

"Oh, no!" I thought to myself while running down the stairs to discover water pooling out from our furnace room in the direction of the hot water tank. I yelled up at my husband, "Emergency! Emergency!" and he ran down and we frantically tried to clean up the water using every towel and blanket we owned. We seemed to get the water under control and we assumed our hot water tank blew.

If only.

We called a 90-year old plumber who came by the next day and he determined that it was not the hot water tank but a plug somewhere down the line. Except there was a problem (other than the three inches of sloshy water coming up out of our new bathroom), the plumber couldn't find the clean out stack. It turns out that the people who built our house took a couple of shortcuts and the plumber eventually found where the stack should be however it wasn't there. The box was there except the pipe leading outside was encased in eighteen inches of concrete.

Six hours later, the plumber has been jackhammering the stack attempting to find the clean out stack. At this point, all I can do is think about how much this invoice will be. Eventually, on the third day of no water in our house, we called it quits and called another company with more advanced equipment which we should have done at the beginning of the water problem.

So the sloshy water that we had been cleaning up was actually sewer water that had been backing up from a crack at the city access point leading from our house to the main line. My husband had to dig through six feet of icy snow to find where we thought the pipe was. I heard it was awesome.

Anyway, the clog was cleared and the camera found what's called a "belly" in the pipe and a crack which caused "things" to collect and eventually plug our sewer line backing it up into our house.

Yay.

Luckily, our insurance company, their adjuster, the restoration team, the city people. and the fellows with the cameras who cleared the pipe have all been fantastic throughout this process and I am happy to report that I am back in my house and after a day of bleaching everything upstairs, I feel comfortable in my home again - mostly.

The biggest problem with a flood is that your hoarding is put on display for the restoration company. My basement is, and had been, a bit of a mess. We (my husband) have been building the bathroom in the basement so that we could start to make the basement a livable area rather than a storage area forthings I am not ready to deal with (I've been busy, okay?).

As the restoration people came and looked at the volume of stuff in my basement, they sighed and told me that they have seen worse. I am choosing to take them at their word. In the meantime, we have not lost a lot of our things (unfortunately) and the rebuild and excavation at our house should take us well into the summer.

Also, it's been snowing.

Yay.