Problems - Title edited due to spam contents

The New System

Edit note 1/12/12:  I changed the title of this post because of the amount of spam comments it generated. If you ever have a problem of this nature, do NOT name it in the title of the blog post. Idiot spammers.

On to the blog.
If you've been reading the blog, you know that on Christmas Eve, we woke up to the furnace not working. Fortunately, it was a simple problem quickly and easily fixed by our HVAC guy. Thank you, Roy!

Well, in addition to the on-again, off-again HVAC, our plumbing problems reached "You Gotta Fix This" proportions this month. The toilets had been running slow for quite a while; every now and then you had to grab the plunger and race to plunge before the bowl ran over. A couple of weeks before Christmas it began to get really bad, and I procrastinated wanting to ride out the holidays. So, of course, by Christmas it was almost unbearable.

I finally got a reference for a local licensed plumber, and Max gave him a call. He got here this morning and began working on the plumbing. When Joe put the bathroom/laundry room in place of the spare bedroom, of course he didn't hire someone to do it. He saved money and did it himself. Okay, so he saved money for a few years. We're now spending at last count $1500 to fix what Joe messed up.

Joe didn't know diddly about venting and running pipes. The plumber has rerun all the pipes that Joe put in at wrong levels for venting. He's also fixed all the junctions that Joe put in backwards. Yes. Backwards.

Cutting the old cast iron pipe that the original plumbing ran through was more of a task than the plumber looked forward to. I feel for the guy. In addition to it being so heavy that it crashed upon cutting, it was full of sewer water. The plumber and his son had to go change clothes. Enough said.

After the plumbing inside was finally fixed, it created a problem with the pipes running to the city sewer lines. Seems the fixed indoor pipes run too much water for the pipes running to the sewer. So now we're going to have to rotor rooter them out. Oy. It never ends.

As of tonight, however, we now have toilets we can flush as long as we don't flush them 3 times in a row. Tomorrow we'll get the lines to the sewer scoped or routed out, and hopefully there will be enough time to fix the leak under the kitchen sink. Oh, and the fallout from the cast-iron pipe catastrophe was the vent for dryer. It and a stored chair from the dining room set bit the dust in the run from falling cast iron pipes and sewer water.