the drain strain (part i)

we are, as i type this, in the midst of a major renovation on the house…

…as in i’ve been here for almost forty-three years, and can now say i’ve been UNDER my slab kinda renovation:

(this is the drain for my washing machine, for example)

on monday there were two pits dug up – one that you see above, that comes out to about three feet from the house, and one that doesn’t go under the house, that’s supposed to hold the giant pump they’re installing:

this not going under comes back to bite us in the ass a bit, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. the two holes were as far as monday went.

tuesday out came the bobcat – as in this thing:

and my yard got destroyed. that’s not meant as hyperbole – it’s severely fucked up still as of me writing this friday morning, and this was on tuesday.

it wasn’t 100% their fault as we had some hiccups. the first one being the fact that, surprise surprise, the pipes in my front yard are (were) made of clay.

as in terracotta. back then apparently it was a thing. under my driveway, technically, it still is a thing as we didn’t wanna destroy the driveway like we did the sidewalk. so i still have about six feet of clay pipe, and the rest makes the piles of debris in my front yard look like some sort of archeological dig.

from what i read this is still fairly common for in ground stuff. unlike copper or cast iron (the two main types when my house was built) clay can never rust through, and when you think about longevity keep in mind we have dug up clay pottery that is literally older than christ and it’s still in tact…so it should be able to handle our shit (literally) for decades, right?

but right as we were loading up the bobcat, the rains came…and that’s when things got sloppy.

(to be continued)