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: