There is an old plumbing maxim: Hot on the left, cold on the right, and sh*t runs down hill. Well, I gloriously proved that wrong…

Our toilet was leaking water the other night and was doing it in a way that made absolutely no sense.  After troubleshooting everything two times and not being able to come up with an answer a light bulb suddenly went off: what if the sewer is backing up in to the house.  I went outside in my slippers and popped off the lid of the drain clean out to be met with a geyser to rival Old Faithful.

Digging up our front yard the next morning, I thought I would trace the drainline to the sidewalk.  There was an old house on the property that was torn down before we bought the lot, so I just tied our pvc drain line into an old 4″ cast iron pipe that headed out into the street.  Last summer we inspected what I could see of the cast iron and it looked in great shape, so I decided to forgo the expense of running a new line into the street.

What I didn’t realize until I was sitting in a canal of my family’s waste was that after three feet, the cast iron switched over to terra cotta pipe, which was crushed.  (I think I have myself to blame on that one as we happen to run a vibrating plate tamper over that ground a few weeks back when compacting a little path a few weeks back.)

Anyway, never a dull moment at Latitude 38.  Next Friday, I hope to get up some photos of the new Riverbluff house as the exterior is really looking sharp.