Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Our House a.k.a. "The Money Pit"

So onto the house... We bought our house in July 2007. The first two months in the house were pretty good. The normal things went on, cleaning, unpacking, putting furniture in the right places, etc. In mid-October I had started laundry on Saturday morning, and was getting ready to run a few errands. As I pass the bathroom I hear this sort of gurgling sound. Since I had not used the bathroom in a while this was pretty confusing to me. So I go into the bathroom to check the mystery noise and our bathtub was filling up with water from the drain!! Ugh I freak out cuz I have no idea where this water is coming from. My husband was at work at the time so of course I am completely clueless as to what to do. Well I turned the washing machine off and the water stopped filling up. After a few hours of poking around with the plumbing DH discovered that our line from the washing machine dumps into the same line as the bath tub does and something was blocking it. We call Roto-rooter, So I pay X amount of $'s to have him try to snake the pipe. They tell us that the blockage is not in the house that it is in the sewer line in the front yard!! How they figured this out we still don't' know cuz they were snaking the wrong pipe! !%@&*# idiots!! That doesn't work, so they call a camera guy out, (very expensive) and he tells us that the line is completely blocked all the way to under the street. They give us a quote of $6000 to fix everything!! I was in tears because my husband and I didn't have that much in savings and I couldn't believe this was happening. I call my FIL, because is the worlds greatest handyman, to come over and see if he can help us so we don't have to pay that much money. He brought his snake over and snaked the pipe that was in the house and what do you know... The tub drained almost instantly! We dug up a little section in the front yard where Roto-rooter had X'd as the problem spot, and the pipe was cracked but again it wasn't the reason the pipes weren't draining. So we did a temporary fix, on that pipe that had the crack in it, and this spring we will be converting the sewer line from it's clay piping to a PVC piping. We spent over $700 for Roto-rooter to do nothing!!! I am so grateful that my FIL came out and fixed the problem for us! If you ever have a plumbing problem I would not use Roto-rooter they will take you for every penny you have!--Problem #2-- In Jan 08' I was sitting at home watching TV on Saturday, on of my weekend rituals, My husband had just got home from work. I look at him and said "Hi". He had a deer in head lights look and was looking towards our fireplace. So I look at the fireplace and oh my gosh! I have no Idea how I hadn't noticed it earlier, but there was water trickling down the front side of our fireplace! The left side of our fireplace was completely soaked. DH inspects it a little closer and he thinks it coming from the roof. Now we live in CO, so of course the roof was snow packed so he couldn't go up to inspect it. When he finally was able to go up there, he discovered that there was a hole in the base of the fireplace on the roof and that there were pieces of shingles missing from the roof... So yea you guessed it we now have to re-roof this summer, and try and fix the fireplace. The previous owners had put shingles on this part of the house, that according to code are the wrong type. Ugh I swear the people who lived in this house before us had no idea what they were doing what-so-ever! Needless to say we can't a vacation this summer because of the sewer line, and roof projects.. Blah, O well.... Hopefully after this summer we won't have anymore MAJOR problems happen..

2 comments:

gee said...

That sucks!!! It's always good to have a handy man family member. Hubby is a plumber, but not for Roto Rooter.

Korndog said...

Hey there. I found your blog through The Bump 1st Tri board (I'm due July 4th). I wanted to say that my DH and I bought our fixer upper house in Oct of '06 and 2 weeks later we had to replace ALL the sewer lines (from clay to PV). So I totally know what you're going through. I hope it works out.