Enough with the holes

Well, there's more to the story of the hole, but I'm sure you've all had enough pictures of excavated clay to leave you with a serious depression. No need to furrow your brows, I just don't want this blog to fall into a rut or become too much of a niche thing. So at the risk of causing a rift between readers who like the apertures, and readers who prefer a little less orifice with their reading, we'll move on. (You should know better than to leave me an opening, Dad...)

Speaking of perforations (yok yok yok), we had a bit of a mishap with one of the existing pipes. Back when the plumber was jack-hammering the concrete and pounding away at the foundation, the drain from the kitchen sink/garbage disposal starting leaking. Of course, said drain connects to the main drain, into which the toilet empties. I guess what I'm getting at is that we had rather stinky water dripping into a bucket by the laundry sink for almost a week until the plumber could get around to repairing it.

Yesterday was the day, and after he had finished enlarging that bloody hole in the front yet again (no, I'm not posting a picture of it; you can wait until the clean out has been installed) he started taking apart the drain so he could fix it.

Well, as he put it to us later, the War Department and I "need to start using the garburator properly". Turns out the whole pipe was full (and I mean, FULL - we have no idea how the water even drained out of the sink at all, it was that plugged) of old, stinky vegetable matter. The end result of this was that our plumber found himself attempting to hold up one end of a pipe that weighed about twenty pounds more than he had expected while attempting to cut through the other end.

The balancing act ended badly.

After he'd cleaned up the water and crud that had burst over the basement, he cut off the top of the main stack, cut through the old cast iron pipe of the toilet drain (have I mentioned how happy we are to not have been at home for any of this?), and replaced it all with shiny new plastic drain pipe. I have no good "before" picture, but the aftermath looks like this, with pretty much everything between the two silver bands new material:



I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the guy does nice work.

On looking over the past few posts, I have noticed one rather serious omission. It occurs to me that perhaps the best way to convey just how much digging we've done would not be to show you pictures of holes, but to show you how much dirt we've had to move:



It hurts just looking at it.