Sunday, October 8, 2017

House Rebuild Days 6 & 7 -- The Great Drain Debacle

Ok, no pictures from Day 7 -- spent a couple hours Saturday morning cleaning stuff up and some minor demolition work inside. Other than that it started to rain and I wanted to rest well after a long week!

Day 6 however...hoo boy.

So it was too wet in August to try and dig out the drain, but it's pretty dry right now. No time to dig it out properly, but let's rent a roto-rooter from Home Depot and snake it out and see if that helps...

Rolled it right out of the truck and onto a pallet which gave me a solid surface for the machine.


It is flowing, but would still backup when it rains.


Well Frack...it got stuck. It got stuck darn good. Guess who got to start digging out the drain anyway?

Still not free...and while it was an iron pipe that came out at the spring, the rest was Orangeburg pipe (basically pipe made from tar paper)...*sigh*. Worse, there had to be a bend in it -- while the spring is perpendicular to the house, the Orangeburg is at about a 60 degree angle.

When I finally freed it up after digging up another section not one was I dealing with Orangeburg pipe breaking up...I also retrieved a five foot long mass of roots o_O and out came small bits of debris from the basement which tells me the rest of the pipe is relatively clear.

Home Depot Run...let's try lining the remaining 4" Orangeburg with 3" Schedule 40.


Dig it out a bit more so I can insert the Schedule 40 straight and level

Unfortunately I could only get it in a few feet -- feels like I am hitting a broken seam in the Orangeburg.

It is functional though and will get me through the winter, with confidence I can cover up the sump in the basement again and not worry about sump pumps again (plus I ordered a water alarm to go in the basement in case the water level does go high enough to need to put in the sump pump again).

Also cleaned up the soil that got contaminated with debris from tearing down the screen porch while the hill was fairly dry -- when I got in this area this summer it was too wet to do work with the tractor.

Eight hours in Muck boots...oh these socks are going to smell funky when I get the boots off!

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