that's unfortunate

[cimorene]

The septic tanks for the tenant wing that we couldn't afford to replace with new connections to the sewer when we bought the house have been giving us trouble since. The pipes themselves are degrading and it's worse all the time, but there are two floor drains in the basement under the cement floors, unfortunately.

Last week the septic tanks were drained and just like the last time, only six months ago, the drains were still stopped because of how the old pipes are so easily clogged - they're so rusty that chunks of them are falling off and they're full of cracks that get things stuck in them and produce clogs. We had the guy with the truck to blast the blocks out with water on Wednesday and then today sewage started coming out of the floor drain in the sauna again.

We got lucky though - today the blockage is between the third septic tank and the street. It can probably be fixed just by bypassing that tank with a short bit of new pipe out in the yard.

But the plumbing on the tenant side is not going to last long, according to the plumbers we've had. We have a little money unexpectedly inherited from my great uncle, and we wanted to replace the roof once we find out how much of it we owe in taxes... we don't even know if it would be enough for that, but now it looks like we have to get quotes for this plumbing instead and it might not even wait long enough for us to get a response from the tax agency.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Oh no! Old houses; love them but yeesh.

[cimorene]

Possibly we should have refrained from buying it once we got all the reports from the inspection and we knew both the roof and the drains SHOULD be redone and we didn't really have the budget for either. It was like, "It should be fixed and it might last five or ten years maybe, if you can't do it yet, but it's a ticking time bomb..." But we all wanted to count on the more optimistic estimates of renovation cost and of how long we could put it off! Unfortunately future us wasn't there to say "Always count on the most pessimistic estimate and then add 10% worse just in case!"