A Month of Construction Part 1

At the end of December our kitchen sink clogged... AGAIN!  We have lived in our house for 5 years and it was new when we bought it and ever since we have lived in it our kitchen sink clogs on a regular basis.  After this last time, we knew that something had to be wrong.  The plumber came over and I explained that this is a regular occurrence.  It just so happened to clog the night before I had to cook dinner for two other families and had to make cookies for something.  So needless to say, my kitchen was a disaster because I couldn't wash any of the dishes.  As he looked around the kitchen he asked, "Well, are you abusing it?"  I replied, "Ah, no..., I rarely put any grease down the drain and I try to dump things in the garbage.  Casey wanted me to call him when he got there so he could talk to him and asked him to run a camera down the pipe.  It turned out that about 55-75 feet into our house we had a bent pipe that always had standing water in it, which was why it clogged up so easily.  I asked what that entailed and he replied, You don't want to know.  They were going to have to jack hammer through the cement foundation so they could take out and replace the pipe.  This all happened late in the afternoon so first thing in the morning we called our Home builder and they were out that day to look at it along with the plumber that installed it.  They wanted to start over Christmas break but we thought it would be better when the kids were back in school so there were less distractions for the workers.  So the first week of January started the work.  Each day brought something new.  This is a tour of our bedroom and bathroom.

This is a picture of our bedroom door! Everything had to be taped off so that the dust from the cement didn't get everywhere.

This is the hole right after you go through that lovely plastic door.

This is a "hallway" to the bathroom.  They taped off everything, our bed is on the other side of this.  We couldn't sleep in our bed because they only way to get to it is through the back door and we were worried that our children might wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to get to us.  So for about a week Casey and I got to cuddle on a full size mattress that I had before we were married.

This is another hole in the bathroom.  There is a tunnel under our shower to the other hole.

This is the huge pile of dirt and rocks that was from the holes and the tunnel.

Lovely large rocks in a huge pile in my bathroom!

 

Everything is back to normal now and it did take awhile to get rid of the plastic stink.  It's nice to have a fully functioning pipe!  The one bonus was the plumber who originally installed the bad pipe gave us his card and told us that as long as we live in the house we could get free plumbing.