Just in case you thought we were sitting around doing nothing

c/o City of Victoria
Public Works Dept.
Victoria,

October 21, 2009

Dear Mr. Guy In Charge

I am writing to request a refund for expenses incurred when a blocked sanitary sewer line on City property caused a backflow of sewage into my basement on three separate occasions.

On the first occasion, September 8, 2009, we noticed what appeared to be relatively clean water coming up from the drainage hole in the pan for our hot water heater. The water receded fairly quickly and, after cleaning up what remained, we called Roto-Rooter to come and clean out the sewer lines between our house and the City’s section. The visit cost $141.75, but thanks to a mostly empty concrete basement storage room, nothing was damaged.

One month later, on October 6, 2009, the sewage backed up again, this time coming up not only from under the hot water tank in the storage area, but also from beneath the toilet in our basement bathroom. There was a great deal more water on this occasion, and it was dirty, foul-smelling, and clearly sewage given the amount and nature of the particulates within it. We called Roto-Rooter again, and they came back on an after-hours emergency call. Once again, they cleaned the drains between our house and the street. Although their guarantee from the previous cleaning was in effect, we still had to pay the cost of the after-hours visit, which resulted in another bill for $141.75.

Early the next morning, the sewer backed up again, resulting in yet another flood of foul liquid throughout our basement storage area and the downstairs bathroom. Roto-Rooter came back immediately and cleaned all of the pipes and drains beneath the house, but found no blockages or obstructions that could account for the repeated backups. They returned for a fourth time that afternoon with a camera and scoped the entire length of our sewer line, eventually finding the cause of the problem.

Evidently, our sanitary sewer line connects with our neighbour’s sanitary sewer before joining the main city line. The Roto-Rooter camera found a collapsed portion of the City’s sewer line, which greatly reduced the flow of sewage into the main line, and effectively sent our neighbour’s sewage back up our pipes and into our basement.

Fortunately, we had removed most of our possessions from the basement storage room after the first incident, and thus none of our belongings (at least, nothing of any value) were damaged. Unfortunately, the sewage did permeate and completely ruin the floor of our bathroom, which we had just finished renovating less than a year ago. We have had to rip up the damaged planking, as well as the rotten subfloor, and reinstall the entire floor. We repaired the damage ourselves, so we are not seeking contractor’s labour costs, but we are seeking compensation for multiple Roto-Rooter visits, and the cost of the materials required to restore the bathroom floor.

We are therefore requesting reimbursement for the following expenses:
Roto-Rooter: $141.75
Roto-Rooter again: 141.75
Roto-Rooter again, of course: 325.50
RONA (plywood): 65.39
Finishing Store: 419.35

TOTAL: $1093.74


Sincerely,

Don and Amy


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We have a new champion!

It's official: drywalling is the new worst job EVER.

And with that in mind, I'm going to tell you how I really feel about it.

The next paragraph is not intended for children, the elderly, or my mom. If you're uncomfortable with coarse language, just skip it entirely. If, on the other hand, you bear a morbid fascination for general cursing, and want to get a sense of how much I really hate drywall, go ahead and highlight it to read.

I've thought better of it and removed my little curse-fest. Mostly because it doesn't really fit with the usually genial nature of the blog, and partly because my mom might decide to read this bit. (Hi Mom!) But if you want to hear me recite the whole thing, feel free to drop by anytime before we finish the drywall...

Ah. I feel so much better. Now that's out of the way, how about a mid-week update?

Last night we decided to head back into the bathroom and have another go at the piece of drywall on the left side of the bathroom door. I dunno if I mentioned, but the last time we cut it, we completely munged the placement of the cutouts and had to start all over. Well, this time didn't go any fuc... er, any darn better. (Ok, so maybe the swearing isn't completely out of my system.)

We measured carefully, and cut the piece just as carefully - so you can imagine our "surprise" when it didn't quite fit. It seemed a tad long, so we took it back out of the bathroom, and I carefully trimmed a little bit off the top. Then we hoisted it back into place... and it was a little bit too short. Okay, it was a lot too short. Short enough that, yes, we had to chuck the piece and start over.

It was about at this point that we looked at each other and wondered aloud whether we should just hire somebody to do the rest of the job for us. It was seriously that demoralizing.

Rather than give up, however, we soldiered on and decided to tackle another piece instead. Of course, we picked another of the more difficult pieces - the big one running across the top half of the bathroom wall that backs onto the workshop. The one with two cutouts in it - one of which was round. (Octagonal, actually, but who's counting?)

I won't bore you with the details, or inflict further accounts of the swearing involved, but suffice to say that by the time we finally got it into position (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), it was ten after eleven. And it still sort of looked like shit.

So you can probably imagine how amazingly eager we were to get back to it tonight, what with the "success" of last night's effort, but to our delight and amazement, we managed to get two pieces (one of which was of the more difficult variety) measured, cut, and hung tonight.

Behold, the bathroom is now sealed off from the workshop!





Here's where the bastard piece we just can't get to work is supposed to go:



Check out that awesome ceiling line, eh? It's no freakin' wonder it won't bloody fit...

Anyway, my beer is finished, and I'm going to bed.

Fuck drywall.

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The satisfaction of a job well done...

...and the taste of a good beer to go along with it:



But, I'm getting ahead of myself. It's been a very long weekend, and we've been very productive. So let's get to the REAL updates, shall we?

Oh, and this is probably as good a time as any to remind you that my camera SUCKS. I mean, I may have mentioned it before, and you've seen the evidence of that, but for some reason, it was particularly crappy today. I apologize in advance for the poor quality of some of the images in this post.

Okay, I apologize in advance for the poor quality of ALL of the images in this post. Hey, at least there's a lot of them.

As required by our miracle worker (i.e.: the plumber), the wall inside of which we intend to run the new water pipes for the laundry has been erected:



Of course, that's not even half of the wall that needs to go there eventually, but it's enough for him to get started tomorrow. And, much like every other wall I've framed, this one needed to be done twice. Because I suck. And because I always forget to double check BEFORE I drill the Tapcons. Stupid squareness. It's highly overrated, I say.

Anyway, that was actually the least of the jobs we undertook this weekend. Rather, we took advantage of the good weather (probably the last of it) to go hard on the outside and get the downspouts hooked up and ready for the winter rains.

The driveway hole was the easiest, as the downspout there is closest to the main sewer drain in the front yard. We have a little more confidence that it will drain properly and so it was a relatively simple matter to connect the downspout directly to the cleanout we installed:



Looks pretty spiffy, eh?

The back yard was a little more complicated because we're a little less certain about its ability to drain properly - and because it sees arguably the highest volume of water of any side of the house. The backyard slopes perceptibly in the direction of the house, and there's no diversion in place for the rainwater from the roof.

Our solution was to design a dual-downspout system; one for summer, and one for winter. The summer one will connect directly to the perimeter drain (like the one in the driveway), but the winter set-up will need to divert the rainwater from the roof away from the foundation. Here's the winter system in place and ready for the impending deluge(s):



Note the cap over the branch of the drain where the downspout would normally go. In the spring, we'll take that off and attach a piece of pipe leading right from the downspout and into that side of the drain. Just to help with perspective, and to give you an idea of how far that extends, here's another shot from the side:



Oh, and of course, we couldn't have really done any of this had the War Department not been working hard all week to get the holes filled in and graded properly. Evidence of this can be seen in the remarkable diminishment of the enormous pile of crap in the backyard:



I'm somewhat amazed that as much of that went back into the holes as it did.

The last downspout was the one beside the window on the west side, and we approached that with much the same strategy as the downspout in the backyard. It also happens to be the side of the house with the least amount of drainage, so we needed to make sure the water from the roof drained out as far from the foundation (and the blocked perimeter drain) as possible. Here it is, all set up and raring to go for the winter:




Okay, I admit, that looks absolutely ridiculous, but you know what? I think it's going to work.

So, yeah. We've got the outside almost finished. We just have to lay down some sand and asphalt in the driveway to cover up that patch of dirt, do a little more grading and filling in the backyard, and get rid of the rest of the (not-so) enormous (anymore) pile of crap.

Oh, and in the midst of all that work, we still managed to replace the railroad ties in the front yard - and even mow the lawn!



Almost looks normal again, doesn't it? And no, we're not planning on filling in that gap around the cleanouts before spring. Amy wants to redo the front bed anyway, and there's no sense in digging it all up now (thankfully).

Oh, and thanks to a friend's determination to save his house from a quartet of leaning Douglas firs, we managed to top up our wood pile for the winter:



(And that's not all of it...) Thanks Cesar!

Anyway, I'm off to enjoy what little remains of the weekend... what? Time for bed?

Bloody hell. Read more...

More gravel than you can shake a shovel at

Who knew gravel could be so heavy? PICTURE-heavy, that is... heh heh heh. Small joke there.

Very small.

Anyway, gravel day has come and gone, and I would have to classify it as a complete success. We didn't get all of the dirt back, but we did get the gravel in and the landscape fabric down in all three remaining holes. I also managed to take lots of pictures, so fair warning: there are more picture of holes (and gravel) in this post than you probably really wanted to see all at once.

So, I started off the morning with a trip to, of course, the gravel yard, where I picked up a half-yard of 3/4" drain rock. For those of you who don't know, this is what a half-yard of gravel looks like:



It doesn't really look THAT impressive, I know, but that's still enough weight to make the truck's mudflaps scrape when going around corners or over any bumps.

Anyway, I started with the hole in the driveway, figuring that the sooner we filled that in, the less chance there was of someone falling into it. (I have no idea how that hasn't already happened. Probably because we haven't exactly encouraged visitors over the past few months...)

Here's what it looked like with the greater part of a half-yard of gravel in it:



And of course, with a little landscape fabric on top to keep the crappy-ass clay that passes for soil around here from mixing with that nice clean gravel:



It took another trip to the gravel yard to get enough to fill in the hole on the west side too, but we got that all ready for dirt before we broke for lunch:




Just for reference's sake, the TOP of the perimeter drain is 18" below the top of the gravel.

Finally, the piece de resistance (you'll have to imagine the proper accents over the vowels in that - I'm too lazy to look up the HTML); the big trench in the backyard. Before we get to that, however, let's look at some random factoids:

• In all, it took six trips to the gravel yard (for those of you that have trouble with math, that's three yards of gravel).


• Each half-yard of gravel cost $22.04 (including tax).


• We just willfully buried a hundred and thirty-two dollars and twenty-four cents in our yard. Kinda like pirates burying their treasure. But not really.(If you want it, good luck digging it up.)


• We saved $45 in delivery charges. Woo hoo.

Anyway, here's a bunch of pictures of the long hole. I really like the way that rubberized sealant set up, by the way. It's very cool stuff.






Oh, and as a very special treat, it's time for a brief edition of everyone's favorite recurring feature...

The Injury Report:

• I have a pair of nasty scrapes on the underside of my left arm where one of the handles of the wheelbarrow gouged me when I was trying to flinch away from a wasp (actually, it might have been a butterfly, I don't remember exactly), and did this funky little half-step dance move while letting go of one handle and pushing the other away or something. Hard to describe. Well, hard to visualize, and I'm still not sure how the handle of the wheelbarrow managed to scrape me in the spot that it did, but there you are...

Anyway, we're taking today off to do some shopping, chores, and other stuff. We've earned it.


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Things in holes

Having spent the better part of the week all full of gauze, painkillers, and not a little pudding, I was raring to get cracking the past few days. So despite the fact that my face has still not regained its customary lantern-jawed majesty, I've managed to contribute to the renovation effort quite a bit.

As a matter of fact, with the exception of one small piece in the back cleanout, the drainage pipes are finished! Wooo! They would have been done completely, but we were one tiny little trip to Rona short of supplies...

On Tuesday, I spent most of the evening (what little daylight remained after work, that is) preparing the west side hole and the back yard trench for their respective pipes. This shouldn't have been that big a job, but when Mr. Drain Snaker (hee hee hee) cleaned out the clay tiles, he generated a lot of mud that had to be cleared away before I could get the new pieces in.

Here's what the back trench looked like when I finished digging out the last bits of clay drainage tile and made room for a shallow bed of gravel underneath:



Yesterday, we put in the pipes for the west side cleanout, and were quite happy when they proved to be somewhat easier than the stubborn bastards in the driveway:



Oh, and while I was around that side of the house, I snapped a picture of the corner where we decided NOT to dig down to clear out that last section of blocked drains:



You can see why we would rather avoid that, eh? That's the hole underneath the office window on the left, and the concrete base of the front porch on the right. The thick black cable (barely visible behind the camilia) is the electrical service to the garage that we laid last summer. The Ditch Witch we used to dig parts of that trench was a fun beast of a machine, I tell ya. But that's a story for another blog; one that... uh ... doesn't get updated anymore? I dunno.

Moving on.

So, tonight, I tackled the long section of the back trench and managed to get the pipes installed and the cleanout (eventually) positioned properly below the downspout:




Looks pretty cool, eh? All those cleanouts should make for a very happy crew of drain snakers the next time they come out.

Of course, Amy wasn't exactly idle. She tackled the thankless job of putting all that dirt from the hole in the front yard back where it came from (we're going to fill the rest of it, up to the level of the flowerbed, with topsoil):



That's such a tremendous relief, even though the front yard still looks like some kind of petty war zone:



So Saturday is gravel day. Yay! Joy! I look forward to posting plenty of pictures of holes half-full of gravel (I bet you can't wait!), and maybe a couple of shots of the ENORMOUS BLISTERS we'll both undoubtedly have.

Oh, and just so we're clear on this, "gravel day" involves five or six separate trips to the gravel yard (and therefore five or six loads of gravel), and a great many trips with the wheelbarrow. No delivery truck/Bobcat operator for us, no sirree!

I'm beginning to wonder if "gravel day" is going to make "concrete day" seem like a vacation... Read more...

Me and my chipmunk cheeks, reporting in

Well, having spent the weekend looking and feeling like a doped-out chipmunk with a baseball in each cheek, I can't claim to have helped overmuch with any of the work this weekend. Unless you count lying on the couch wondering if I'm always going to look like a basset hound chewing a pair of grapefruits...

Fortunately, the War Department was feeling fit as a fiddle, and in between waiting on me hand and foot ("Woman! More pudding!" voiced as a polite request does not, in fact, seem to engender a positive response, nor does it produce the requested soothing snack), she managed to do quite a bit.

We've both been quite eager to get the outside buttoned up, what with the fall deluges just around the corner, so Amy spent a lot of time working outside (and no, not ONLY to get away from my infrequent demands for pudding).

We begin our photo journey in the back yard, where after carefully washing the wall, she painted the exposed foundation with Blue Seal Waterproofing:




It's kind of a nice blue, isn't it? Apparently, it's not the easiest stuff to work with, being rather thick and gummy, but of course I wouldn't know as I was fully occupied with keeping the couch from floating out the living room window on a cloud of fluffy white painkillers.

Ahem.

Anyway, I DID manage to sit in a comfy chair in the front yard and supervise while Amy attached the cleanouts to the pipes in the front hole:



But I had long retired inside to a baseball game by the time the War Department returned from the gravel store and put half-a-yard of drain rock down on top of them:



I told you it was a big hole.

On Sunday, I once again sat in a chair and supervised while Amy measured, cut, filed, glued, swore at, and cut pipes for the cleanout in the driveway hole:



Okay, I did help a little more with this one, but only because Amy's come to the realization that she HATES doing these pipes for some reason. I don't mind it at all, so in the end, I guess it works out.

Any way, that was our weekend. Equal parts whining, moaning, and feeling sorry for myself. Oh, sorry - that was MY weekend. Amy was actually pretty busy.



I'm going to go see if there's any pudding left.
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We've been working. No, really, we have.

Ah, the joys of renovating an older house. It’s a non-stop, never-ending barrel of poo-flinging monkeys is what it is.

Last week wasn’t one of the more productive weeks we’ve had, sadly, which is why I haven’t exactly been burning up the intertubes with updates. Our lack of progress wasn’t for lack of trying, however, with my adventures on Thursday night providing a prime example of how to work hard and have nothing to show for it.

With the War Department off to a barbecue, I decided to start framing the other half of the Dread Wall of Pink^TM. Given my fancy new toy, I figured I could easily do the footer and top plate, and probably get a few studs in before Amy got home. Man, did I ever overestimate my own competence.

I’m still not entirely sure what I did wrong or how I screwed up, but it took me two hours just to get the footer down. Once I did, the top plate was going in fine, until I saw how far away from the wall one end of it was. That is to say, farther away than the other end…Oops.

When Amy returned, I had just finished pulling up the footer plate so lovingly laid down. I was in the midst of trying to re-mark the line for the footer, and had been at it for three hours with nothing to show for my efforts save a few mostly straight smudges on the concrete. It was not a good time.

Friday and Saturday, thankfully, went a little better as I managed to get the wall up, studded, and braced while Amy installed a new dryer circuit (at great personal risk).




While my task might make the better picture, hers was much, much harder. You can kinda see the smudgy bit on the left where the old, frayed, piece-of-crap cable came down the wall. It's a much nicer set up, now.

Also on Saturday, we revamped the gutter system on the garage so that the rainwater off the roof would be diverted farther away from the walls. Now our little garage looks like some kind of grotesque alien life form has infected it and it’s preparing to walk away on spindly white legs:



Heh, that would be so cool...

By the way, the War Department once again did all the hard stuff. I just cut away the existing downspouts and attached the new pipes; Amy went up the ladder and cleaned and re-caulked all the seams and corners in the gutters.

We had been waiting rather anxiously all weekend for the drain cleaning guy to come and he finally showed up on Monday morning. It took him about three hours to snake all of the drains… well, almost all of the drains….

See, our foundation isn’t exactly square. It’s mostly square, but more like a square with a chunk missing out of the southwest corner, where our front porch sits. The porch (though it’s something of an overstatement to call it as such) is concrete, and has its own footer (I would hope). The problem this present for the drains, and the guy doing the cleaning in particular, is that it adds a couple of extra corners to the system, one of which is an “inside” 90-degree bend.

Well, the guy doing the snaking (heh, that sounds dirty) couldn’t quite work his way completely around those corners under the porch slab. Here, I made a picture:



The thick grey line is our foundation, and the black square is (roughly) the front porch. The burgundy (merlot?) circles indicate where we dug the holes below each of the downspouts (the circle at the top is the massive hole in the front yard), and the red lines represent all of the perimeter drains that the guy was able to clean. (He also cleared out the line that leads away from the house to the city storm drains, which was a huge relief.) The thick, nasty, mockingly obstinate blue line is the one portion of the drain that he just couldn’t reach.

Sigh.

We're not sure yet how we're going to deal with it. Digging down to the drain tile in that corner would be prohibitively difficult, what with the giant camilia there, not to mention the high voltage line that runs out from that corner on its way to the garage. At the moment, and acting on the advice of the drain snaker (hee hee), I think we're leaning towards leaving it as is - at least until next summer, anyway.

In the meantime, clean drains mean we can start installing cleanouts and new drain tile, so that's what we did. It only took two evenings!



(I'm always amazed by how shallow that hole looks in pictures. It certainly isn't that shallow when I'm trying to haul my fat ass out of it because I accidentally put the piece of pipe down out of reach again.)

The upward-pointing, gaping holes in the pipe are where we plan to install the cleanouts. We'll have a little family of cleanouts in the front flower bed; two for the perimeter drain in classic white, and one for the sewer in foreboding black. Lovely.

Anyway, I can't promise any progress (or updates) this weekend as I'm having my wisdom teeth out tomorrow, and plan on spending most of the next four days feeling sorry for myself and asking Amy to do even the simplest things in an increasingly annoying whine.

It's gonna be GREAT! Read more...