Apparently I’m still moping. As evidenced by the fact that I am about to have a caramel pear tart and beer for supper.

You do what you have to, I guess.

So to continue the saga of the sewer line, when it backed up again and we were confronted with the fact that we were not going to get by on occasional augering, Ian decided that he was capable of doing it himself.

I know right.

I was totally wide-eyed and all, “reeeeally??” But I question him a lot less on these things than I used to. So we sat down and watched some youtube videos one night and I agreed that he could totally do it and we started planning the job.

The first weekend he started demolition, he was also going to route this clever bypass sewer line that would run across our basement floor and into the city’s drain line so that we could continue to live in the house while he worked. In order to do that, he had to replace our sewer stack and in order to do that he needed a reciprocating saw to cut through the old cast iron stack. I was out with a friend when he called to say, “I just realized I need a Sawzall. My friend N- has one, but it’s in the possession of one of his friends. He said he could bring it to me, but the guy hasn’t shown up. Since I’m blocked until I can get one, I think I’m going to have to go buy or rent one.”

We were discussing on the phone how much that would be worth it when my friend jumped in to say, “J- might have one”, meaning her husband, who is in construction. So we stopped at her house, procured a reciprocating saw from her husband and ran it back to Ian to take apart the plumbing stack.

Later that night, Ian and I took stock of where we were at. If we spent the week on demolition, by next weekend, we figured, he could be pulling up concrete. He had been advised to rent a wet concrete saw, so we figured we’d better look into that.

On a lark, I texted my friend, “Does J- have access to a concrete saw?” She replied, “That he does not have.” “Yeah, I didn’t think he probably would, but it was worth a shot.” I said. “Wait, now he’s asking how big of one do you need,” she texted me.

I told her what it was for and she replied, “he says let him know when and he can bring one over one the weekend and help you get the concrete up.” “Ummm. Okaaaaay,” I said, “but how will we pay you back?” And she replied, “chocolate mousse tarts.”

Done.

When the weekend came, both she and her husband had to work Saturday,  but they volunteered to come over after work. That gave Ian the day to rip out the walls and the stairs and me the day to clean and make tarts and supper.

After supper, Ian and J- went downstairs and sawed concrete until concrete dust was coming through the crack under the door and making the house look smoggy. I put a towel down at the door, but, who knows, it could even have been coming through the floor boards. It certainly filled the house.

And it didn’t end up being as easy as any of us had hoped to get the concrete up. They got a good start, but after a couple of hours they stopped for chocolate mousse tart and quit for the night. J- ended up leaving the tools and Ian continued the work himself the next day.

He also switched to using an air-hammer instead of the saw because, although slightly more arduous, it didn’t throw up so much dust.

There was some point during a respite from the concrete-breaking and digging that Ian said, “I keep thinking that this pipe looks like it’s in pretty good shape. There better be a crack somewhere or I’m going to be upset.”

And we really hadn’t done our due diligence on diagnosing the problem before we started digging. The first plumber had speculated that there was a separation and suggested running a camera down it to make sure, but we hadn’t gone for it, thinking we would when we decided to pursue the issue. The next time the sewer backed up, we’d been awfully hasty to confess the situation to the next plumber and that guy made sad, sad faces at us and told us it wasn’t worth it to auger it when we should be fixing it right and then quoted us a number clearly aimed at discouraging us from having it augered, so we had gone straight to digging it up ourselves.

However, when it came time to start getting the old pipes out of the ground, it turned out it was the top half that looked good. The bottom half was pretty much all rust. Ian said he had hit it hard with the sledgehammer and the pipe shattered.

And it was completely full of roots.

So now the new lines are laid and everything in our house is flushing as it should. It remains that we have no basement and no washer and dryer until we fill in that massive trench and pour new concrete and build new stairs.

To tell the truth, whenever the project has seemed overwhelming, I just pretend to myself that our goal is really all about building me some new stairs and it’s just taking some very complicated demolition work.

When we were shopping for this house two years ago, we definitely did that thing of telling our realtor that we were willing to do some fixing up in order to get a deal. But then we ended up buying the house that was really move-in ready.

In retrospect, I don’t think it’s that we ended up being pickier or lazier than we predicted. There are actually very few four-bedroom houses in our price range, so a lot of what we were looking at were three bedroom houses that could be four if we built a significant addition or if we gutted the entire second door and rearranged all the walls. We looked at one that had the space but the work it needed was to the extent that we’d be probably pulling up and replacing most of the floor boards and joists, they were so warped and slanted.

And the one that needed about the right amount of work – de-suiting and putting in some new walls – sold too fast for us to even get a look at it.

Anyhow, we paid more to buy the house that already had the right number of bedrooms, but we sure did like just being able to settle in and select our projects based on making our house homier and more ‘us’.

The first year and a half was awesome.

We repainted two of the kids rooms, replaced their ugly carpet with pine planking, and paneled their ceilings.

We de-fussed the kitchen and put up some beautiful shelves.

We built lovely pantry shelves along the basement stairwell.

But then last fall our sewer backed up. We called the city to come auger our drains, but they said their drain was clear and the problem was in the drain pipes under our house. So we called a private plumber and he fought with getting a snake through our drain and after managing to clear it, said “I’m pretty sure you have a separation there.”

“What does that mean?” I asked him.

“It means that drain pipe has probably cracked.”

I stood there for a long time and then said “well, what do you do about something like that.”

He shrugged, “jackhammer up the concrete, replace the pipe and then pour new concrete over it.”

He figured the line ran right under our basement stairs and they’d have to be ripped out too. I asked him about how much it would cost. He paced it out and guessed $10,000.

“And that would just be jackhammering, replacing the pipe and pouring concrete. We’d still have to rebuild our own walls and stairs,” I guessed. He nodded.

I relayed all this to Ian and we concluded that as the augering had seemed to fix the issue, we would just sit tight and hope we could get through a couple of years on occasional augering until we could save a chunk of money. We had, at the time, just finished with that stupid, expensive wedding (I mean our stupid, expensive wedding).

Well I’ve already blogged that Ian started fixing our sewer line last weekend, so you already know that this doesn’t end with a drain patiently waiting for us to save up ten grand.

It ends with a weekend of this: