It feels like a long road to get to this post. We were hoping to hire a plumber in August, but we ran into delays getting reliable quotes and we didn’t wind up signing paperwork until the latter half of September. At the time, we were told it would be “roughly six weeks” depending on permit, a qualifier that stretched and stretched and stretched the plumbing work into months and months of very little getting done. It’s been nice to have a bit of a break from working on the house all the time, but it’s a strange, frustrating sort of limbo since we don’t know how long it will take and we had hoped to not spend another winter living on the second floor with an unheated first floor.
The below-grade rough plumbing in the basement was done in mid-October, and the new water service went in back in mid-December, but the sewer lining was delayed by the city requiring the sewer “tap” to be repaired. That was finally done a couple weeks ago (mid-February), after which they needed to come back out and re-scope the sewer because the city couldn’t locate the first recording. Permit was finally issued yesterday and they “shot the liner” today. Because this —like the rest of the plumbing— was not DIY, I don’t have a ton of pictures of the process. Also it’s underground and there’s not a ton to see, but we’ve done what we could.
If you’re not clear on what sewer lining is, the short version is they make a new plastic pipe inside our existing clay sewer pipe so that we don’t have to dig everything up and lose the tree in the front yard. At the same time, said tree can’t grow roots into the pipe because it’s seamless all the way out to the sewer under the street. Here’s a video that explains the process:
With this work completed, the plumbers need to come back (possibly tomorrow) and finish the underground work by connecting the newly-lined sewer to a short section of new cast iron pipe (instead of temporary PVC), so we can finally start work on the basement floor.
