Playing in the Muck

 

It wasn't very long ago that we drastically improved our sewage plumbing situation at our house from this (which still makes me cry-laugh)...

To this.

Unfortunately, although our pristine new plastic plumbing looked pretty good, at least by comparison, the existing underground plumbing that came with the house appeared to be letting us down. As I alluded to here, we've been having leakage and seepage issues. We had initially thought that it was simply a volume issue, since at first we only had leakage issues when we were running the washing machine and a lot of sudsy water was flowing through the pipe.

But then we started noticing a trickle seeping up from the ground near the pipe, and said trickle did not smell very nice. Cue the collective "ewwwwwwww".

So, something had to be done. And unfortunately for Tom (since I drew the line and pulled the "I'm a girl" card on this one), this involved digging up all of the dirt around the pipe, to identify the source of the problem.

And it wasn't pretty.

As it turned out, the very old terracotta pipe that was laid when the house was first built was cracked and broken in quite a few very important places. And once it lost its protective layer of surrounding dirt, it became completely useless and wouldn't keep in any water (or other substances).
 What's more, to our horror, we discovered that not only were the cracked pieces preventing the pipe from holding much water, but there appeared to be a blockage somewhere further along the pipe preventing anything from getting very far. We don't know if we caused the blockage by digging it up and allowing dirt to get inside, or whether the blockage was partly to blame for our leakage issues in the first place.

This all occured on Friday evening last week, and we were faced with the prospect of not being able to use our toilet, shower or kitchen sink until the problem was solved. This was a particularly unpleasant revelation for Tom, who'd been playing with a shovel in a hole filled with dirt and other-things-that-shall-not-be-named all afternoon.

I hit the phone, and started calling all the plumbers I could find in the surrounding areas, and eventually managed to speak to one. The bad news? On a weekend, they would charge us $352 for the first hour, and $44 for every 15-minute increment after that, plus $71.50 for the machine to clear the blockage in the pipe. I'm surprised they didn't want my firstborn as well!

So then we decided... how hard can it be? We checked a few equipment hire websites (since the stores were closed for the day, so wouldn't answer their phones - I tried) and established that the closest ones to us probably had the drain cleaner equipment we needed, for a price of under $100 for a 4-hour hire.

The next morning (after Tom showered himself that night with the hose in the front yard - my apologies to any neighbours who have good eyesight and could see him in the dark), we discovered that we could hire an "electric eel" drain cleaner for the grand old price of $74 for four hours, and we got to work.

image sourced here

I don't have any pictures of this part of the process because it was all hands on deck, but I'm very happy to report that this was actually a reasonably easy procedure! The drain cleaner, which looked almost exactly like the one in the picture above, came with twelve 2.5metre chain thingies (they basically looked like long heavy-duty metal slinkies), that the machine rotated to churn through the inside of the pipe. We made sure we ran the hose at the pipe's opening to try to wash all the nasties off the chains (and into the pipe) as they went, so they weren't anywhere near as disgusting as I thought they would be by the end.

Within an hour or two, we were pretty certain that neither ours nor the neighbour's sewer pipe had any obstructions anymore (thank goodness), and we washed and packed up the machine and had it back at the hire place in record time! We're so used to having to try to pack too much work into a short space of time with other equipment we've hired before that we were amazed at how easy it was to get this job done!

But we were nowhere near finished! This was when the real fun started.

Months ago, when we were first beginning to think about removing our old bathroom, we got the original plumbing plans for the house from the council. They were incredibly primitive (and hand-drawn). Here's a little snapshot showing the division between ours and our neighbour's block, with our house on the right.

The most important thing it told us is that the one and only sewerage pipe running to our block (the heavy dashed horizontal line on the diagram) comes straight across from our next door neighbour's yard, just inside the back wall of each of the houses, and ends on our block. Assuming of course that the diagram was correct, that meant that we don't have anyone else's plumbing running through our block, we're at the end of our little line (or the start rather, since everything obviously has to flow downhill).

Therefore, if we chopped off all of the broken terracotta pipe to the right of the edge of our house on that diagram (roughly where the number '8' is), we could simplify the underground plumbing and eliminate the problem area, without causing ourselves any other problems!

And so we did just that. Tom put the grinder to good use, and simply chopped off the pipe.

As you can see, the open bit of pipe nearly lines up with the back wall of the neighbour's house (it doesn't line up with our house anymore because we slid the house forward when we raised it), which corresponds with the main pipe in the diagram, so we figured we were definitely on the right track.

We could then completely remove all the other bits of terracotta sitting uphill of our cut pipe, giving ourselves a nice, neat, clean slate. Well, as neat as a hole filled with stinky mud can be, anyway.

Then we could finally get to work reconnecting the house's plumbing to the underground plumbing, so we could use our facilities again!

First things first, Tom attached a rubber fitting to the cut terracotta pipe...

 

And then applied some glue to a plastic corner piece...

And attached it to the other end of the rubber piece.

While that was happening I went off to get a load of sand that we could use to fill up the hole we made, since sand will be a lot easier to dig up than clay dirt if we ever have to re-expose this connection (which we will have to do when we do the plumbing for underneath the house eventually).

We popped Allie's food bowl upside down over the opening in the pipe while we unloaded some of the sand.

And then we took about a million photos with a level as reference, to show exactly where the pipe sits in relation to the house, just so we have something to look back at if we ever need to check things.

 

Allie kept a supervisory eye on proceedings, as usual (and what gorgeous eyes they are)!

And then tried to distract us with ball play, which was interesting, since we didn't really want the ball ending up in our giant sewerage hole.

We would not be deterred, though! A few more plumbing pieces later...

And we were installing the last link, to reconnect the house. Hurrah!

So now we have effective waste plumbing again, nicely buried in a hole filled with sand.

Not only does it look a lot neater than the pipe that used to run across the ground, but it also has the added advantage of completely deadening the sound of everything falling down that long vertical section and hitting the corner at the bottom, which was something we had the pleasure of listening to before. We just need to get a little bit more sand to fill up the hole completely, and we're done!

How's that for a before and after?