(no subject)
House no longer stinky!!! YAY!!!!
So, Sunday afternoon . . . after bug bombing the living daylights out of it, Chris ventured forth, broom in one hand, flashlight in the other, into the depths of the crawl space under the family room. Much ouching and grunting and groaning later, he managed to maneuver himself around the back steps (which turned out to be much larger than we had imagined) to the far side of the crawl space. There he found . . .
First, some more background info. When our house was built some 67 years ago, they had the bright idea to run all the gutter downspouts into pipes in the ground. There are clay pipes about two feet below ground that go around the house and all the downspouts feed into this line. Aaaaaand there used to be another of these downspouts just off the back steps, underneath where our family room now is. Coincidentally, this last downspout pipe was the one the others all fed into and goes directly down to the sewer system.
. . . a bit of clay pipe sticking up out of the ground, the top cracked and the cap laying off to the side! A quick whiff of the air coming up out of the pipe confirmed that this, indeed, was the source of all our problems. No idea how it got broken. Probably when they were building the family room or perhaps when the previous owner was stashing away some of the many, many pieces of wood he felt the need to hold onto. (There was an entire stack of 2x4s next to the pipe so it wouldn't surprise me one bit if he accidentally whacked it with one of them when he was putting them under there.)
Apparently, whenever it happened, no one felt it was much of an issue. Just a downspout drain, after all. And it's under the house now so nothing is going to fall into it. Why bother sealing back up? What's the worst that could happen?
Yeah, try . . . having the sewer line repaired so that it is no longer 90% blocked by tree roots and debris and now allows stuff to flow freely through the pipe. Stuff like sewer gas which does NOT flow down the line, but up it!
Anyway, a new piece of pipe slipped down into the broken one and sealed in place, a new cap sealed onto the new piece of pipe, and we are now Stink-Free! YIPPEE!!!
...just wish we would have discovered all this about 12 hours earlier than we did. Before we spent the $350 on having the toilet plumbing redone. *sigh* I guess it needed it anyway, but really!
So, Sunday afternoon . . . after bug bombing the living daylights out of it, Chris ventured forth, broom in one hand, flashlight in the other, into the depths of the crawl space under the family room. Much ouching and grunting and groaning later, he managed to maneuver himself around the back steps (which turned out to be much larger than we had imagined) to the far side of the crawl space. There he found . . .
First, some more background info. When our house was built some 67 years ago, they had the bright idea to run all the gutter downspouts into pipes in the ground. There are clay pipes about two feet below ground that go around the house and all the downspouts feed into this line. Aaaaaand there used to be another of these downspouts just off the back steps, underneath where our family room now is. Coincidentally, this last downspout pipe was the one the others all fed into and goes directly down to the sewer system.
. . . a bit of clay pipe sticking up out of the ground, the top cracked and the cap laying off to the side! A quick whiff of the air coming up out of the pipe confirmed that this, indeed, was the source of all our problems. No idea how it got broken. Probably when they were building the family room or perhaps when the previous owner was stashing away some of the many, many pieces of wood he felt the need to hold onto. (There was an entire stack of 2x4s next to the pipe so it wouldn't surprise me one bit if he accidentally whacked it with one of them when he was putting them under there.)
Apparently, whenever it happened, no one felt it was much of an issue. Just a downspout drain, after all. And it's under the house now so nothing is going to fall into it. Why bother sealing back up? What's the worst that could happen?
Yeah, try . . . having the sewer line repaired so that it is no longer 90% blocked by tree roots and debris and now allows stuff to flow freely through the pipe. Stuff like sewer gas which does NOT flow down the line, but up it!
Anyway, a new piece of pipe slipped down into the broken one and sealed in place, a new cap sealed onto the new piece of pipe, and we are now Stink-Free! YIPPEE!!!
...just wish we would have discovered all this about 12 hours earlier than we did. Before we spent the $350 on having the toilet plumbing redone. *sigh* I guess it needed it anyway, but really!