Homeowner Joys

So, we've had four lovely years in our home.  And I do love our house!  But apparently, it is upset that we wanted to get rid of it and is having a bit of revenge.

This may well be called the tale of the oblivious.  Since I try not to notice frustrating things, it took a while for us to figure out there was something wrong with our house.  But it steadily got worse - cracks in the walls expanding and appearing by just about every door frame, doors sticking and not shutting, and then we noticed we have a floating wall - Dan can put his hand under it.  Well, we figured no one would want to buy our house with it looking like that.  We sucked it up and called a structural engineer to give us a valid opinion on the extent of the damage.  The engineer indicated there is a probability of a leak beneath our slab foundation and we would need (what we think is) significant piering to support our beleaguered foundation.  *sigh*

So we had a plumber come out and test our freshwater and drainage systems to see if we had a leak.  Which we do.  Er, did.  Then he had to come back to find the leak, which was pretty small and slow, so it took a while to locate the leak, but the plumber sure had some nifty tools!  As it turns out, our drainage runs uphill, so apparently the pipes were pretty nasty.  The plumber expressed surprise that our system has never backed up.  So it's nice to have that all cleaned up!

So Thursday we had another plumber come out and fix the leak.  Camden was pretty fascinated with the process and wanted to spend the whole time watching the man work.

Camden was exceedingly startled when the jackhammering began, which vibrated the floor all through the house and was quite loud.

The plumber jackhammered a bit and then used a hammer and chisel to bust up most of the concrete.  He sucked up the chunks with his super-hero shop vac.  It took about thirty minutes to look like this.

Then he dug out the dirt below.  It was tricky to find the pipe, so he actually had to expand his original hole to the left.  He used a long metal piece to poke through the dirt, trying to find the pipe.  

Yay!  He found it!  Took about two hours and a call or two to the original plumber.  The joint is cracked along the lip and you can see the joint slipped.

So he cut out the bad part.  (And no using any water right now!)

And he put in a spanking new part with a more flexible joint piece that should be able to accommodate some movement within the earth. 

Then refill the hole with the excavated dirt.

The re-cement the hole.  And we are all done!   

So now the leak is all fixed.  We got bids from a couple companies about doing the piering.  Apparently this is a super busy summer for them, so we won't be able to get that fixed until probably October.  *sigh*  I think Camden and I will go visit someone while the piers are put in.  Something about multiple holes in the floor, huge equipment everywhere, well...  I think it'd be better/safer to be away!  Then I can come home and have everything all better.