Written by the wife:
I wanted to share with you guys what's happening in our neck of the woods. Poor Tuey is having to play plumber today! We had a major working weekend installing 3 french drains in the backyard with the help of the best friend ever, MV. We rented a trencher and moved tons of dirt and buried the flex pipe with sand and more dirt and then spread all the extra dirt around our dirt filled backyard...you get the point. It was dirty and sweaty and exhausting. We must be crazy to have picked the first weekend in August for such a task, but it was a necessary step before moving on to more fun things, like our patio, so we sucked it up and got it done. All told, we laid 124 feet of underground pipe.
Early in our trenching we ran into the previous owner's poor excuse for a french drain. It had been buried over the years and we couldn't fine where it daylighted so we figured we would just work around it. On down the line we ran into it again with the trencher. Dennis and Mark both commented that it was kind of weird that it was a different kind of pipe but since it had already made the corner to the downslope of the yard it was probably just whatever they had on hand and used it rather than buying more perforated pipe. 2 architects and one day laborer (that would be me) all came to the same conclusion. Cut through it and keep digging!
Fast forward to Monday after all the dirt was back in it's place for the most part and we are feeling pretty good about what we accomplished. We even managed to trim all the trees and drag them to the curb for the biannual brush collection. We are ready to move on now that we have our infrastructure in place. We even kind of hope it will rain, despite the ridiculous mess that will lead to with the dogs, to see how well everything drains out.
I come home from work and wash my face in our bathroom and the toilet starts gurgling. Weird, I think and then recall that I heard that sound this morning after I finished showering. Why would the toilet be bubbling? I yell for Dennis to come in there and complain about what I heard. Of course, it's not gurgling anymore so he makes a joke about me losing sleep at night over a noise that isn't really there and flushes the toilet. That's when things went south.
The toilet backs up, the floor drain in the laundry room overflows, and the tub is filling with water, too. 15 towels and 25 cuss words later we have things leveled off but no solution. Plunging won't work, drain snaking won't work, and Tuey has to leave to go to our neighborhood association meeting. He leaves and comes back in 3 minutes later with the realization. That wasn't the old french drain. That was our plumbing line. The yard is wet all over the area where we cut through the pipe. Lovely.
He spent about 2 hours digging the pipe up last night to give it time to dry overnight and is knee deep in it right about now trying to find the pipe, cut it smooth, and put a replacement piece in. To be followed by, of course, more dirt filling. On the human needs side of the equation, we are lucky that we have two other bathrooms that are on the original plumbing to the main line so we are still able to shower and use the facilities. Tuey leaped from bed to remind me that my excessive 7 AM dish washing was going to create mud for him to work in back there, but apart from that our water usage is wide open.
You fix one problem only to create another one. Typical for the do it yourself renovators that we are. Thank goodness he has the skills, stomach, and back to solve the problem. My husband the plumber. God love him.
