The last couple of weeks we had some water in our basement. Not altogether unusual for a 140 year old house, but enough to be concerned about. Yesterday, our plumber friend came over to have a look at it. He ran his massive snake machine all over the place and that didn’t clear out the problem. (Though he did get rid of some pesky roots from our 100 foot tall sycamore in the front yard.)
So he did a little digging (literally) and discover the source of the problem. There is a key elbow where the new PVC piping linked up with the ancient clay piping. The actual elbow was completely gone. All that was there was an elbow of soil which somehow managed to get most of the waste water down the drain while leaving some of it under our house. Yuck.
Long story short, he’ll be back today to finalize the job. He’ll be re-routing some of our drains and fixing a few other mistakes the previous owner made. All told, it could have been a lot worse. It’s bad… but when you live in an old house like this… there are going to be a lot of previous owner mistakes to undo to get stuff done right by the pros.
Leave a Reply