pameladean

The eventual result of our main drain's backing up and Roto-Rooter coming out and boring through a lot of tree roots to restore function, and then sending out a person with a camera to see just what all was going on with the tree roots and the sewer line in general, was that Roto-Rooter quoted us $17,000 to dig up the yard and replace the ancient clay tiles that constituted the outer part of the sewer line and then to put a liner out into the part of the sewer that lay under the street, so as to avoid also digging up the street; or a mere $12,000 should we decide not to re-line the outer part of the sewer line on the grounds that there would not necessarily be tree roots under the street. I attempted to convey that we could not possibly come up with this kind of money, and got a lecture about how we had a lovely house and when that was the case, sometimes you just have to spend money on it. I was vividly reminded of the bit in one of Dorothy Sayers's books in which she invokes John Maynard Keynes's telling the Allies that the money was not there, and says in her own person that people are much more inclined to believe that the money is there and only wants yelling for.

I got hold of a different plumbing outfit, whose website said that they specialized in "non-trenching repairs"; and they sent another person with a camera, who told me that (a) the entire clay part of the line could perfectly well be relined from inside the house, (b) this would cost about $9000, (c) they offered standard financing or the option to have the entire cost put on our property taxes to be paid off over 20 years at about 4.5% interest, and (d) we'd need to move everything out of the shop because the access they wanted to use was in the far front portion of the shop and they needed all the room they could get to bring in everything they'd need to do the work.

Roto-Rooter and the other plumber, Benjamin Franklin Plumbing Service, agreed that whatever was done, 'twere well it were done quickly, because things could get worse quite suddenly.

We went with Benjamin Franklin. (I am sorry to say that they do not have a kite as their logo.)  David spent several evenings after he got home from work investigating what all was in the shop and clearing space for it elsewhere in the basement, and making lists. My brother Matt came over on the first Saturday after we got the estimate, and they moved everything except the table with the radial arm saw out of the shop. The estimator had said that if we'd clear a path and make room for that in the laundry room, the crew would move that for us.

As soon as I could get around after the flood, I'd mopped the accessible parts of the floor with a bleach solution and then gotten David to rinse it for me, since I was still in the walking cast at that point. But the day after David and Matt cleared out the shop, I made a closer examination of what had gotten wet, and bagged up quite a lot of ruined laundry and general trash and moved it out of the laundry room. Then I cleaned and sanitized a bunch of laundry baskets and, incidentally, the top of the dryer, where somebody had put a pile of non-sanitized baskets. Then I bleached a lot more of the floor and rinsed it and washed it again with Murphy' Oil Soap. Since there was some sitting about while I was waiting for the floor to dry, I took a look at the saw and its attached table. Then I looked at the doorway between the shop and the laundry room. Then I got a tape measure. Nope. The table would not fit through the door. Fortunately, there was a sort of niche between the workbench and the wall of the shop. David and Matt had put a bunch of miscellaneous objects there, but none of them were very heavy. I put all that stuff in the space I'd made for the saw, and decided that the plumbers would just have to make the best of it.

The estimator had called on Friday to say that he would come by with the city paperwork in about an hour and a half, but he didn't show up. I wasn't really very surprised, because it was Super Bowl weekend and downtown must have been a monstrous mess. He'd ended the call with, "See you between seven and eight a.m. on Monday." I didn't know if they would come without the paperwork's being signed, and in any case 7 a.m. is so far from my usual rising time that going to bed early wasn't going to help any. I just went to bed at two and lay awake for an hour, of course. I woke up at seven and was just drifting off to sleep around eight, in the fond belief that the plumbers weren't coming before the paperwork, when David tapped on my door and said apologetically that the plumbers were here and he had discussed routes to the basement with them and unlocked relevant doors and sequestered the cats on the first floor and warned the plumbers not to let them out. But he had to go to work now. I thanked him less graciously than he deserved and got up groggily, now aware of some bustle underfoot. I put on some clothes, brushed my teeth, made a cup of tea, and went blearily downstairs.

The head plumber greeted me with, "Woke up to find a bunch of people in your house, huh?" I admitted that this was so. He made some kindly reassuring remark about how they'd have us fixed up soon. When I later asked him how long it would all take, he told me they'd be out around one or one-thirty, and this was dead accurate. I'd been worried about not being able to flush toilets for so long. The upstairs toilet in particular is very cranky. I'd pictured myself mincing neurotically over the very icy sidewalks to Butter to order a cup of soy chai, use their restroom, and then repeat the cycle endlessly as chai after chai worked its way through my system. But it turned out that for the first part, where they were going to thoroughly "jet out" the sewer line, we could use the drains as usual, though running the washer and dishwasher unnecessarily were discouraged.

I checked on the cats. Lady Jane was in the media room and Naomi was wandering around complaining, but the little black kittens were nowhere to be seen. They came right out when Lydy got home. We put them in the media room with a litterbox, and Lydy sat in there to have her dinner. The cats were displeased and made it clear vocally. Naomi escaped as soon as she could, but she isn't one of the escape artists: we took her out on a leash when she was young, and she considered the outside, turned, and went up to the door to be let back in. When the plumbers left, Naomi immediately demanded food in her usual way. But Ninja and Lady were both quite subdued, and poor Nuit had protested so vehemently for so long that she had lost her voice, and was only able to squeak at me. She got her voice back next day, but it was a very pathetic situation indeed while it lasted.

I'd have liked to go to sleep on the sofa, but with six or seven people parading through the living room with implements of destruction, buckets, and so on, it felt rude. I looked at Twitter on my phone and tried to read Anthony Price's For the Good of the State. Price's dialogue is complicated and his narrative twisty, and I found myself reading the same thing over and over.

The jetting-out of the sewer line was, unsurprisingly, fairly smelly. The lining took a long time but was mostly characterized by periodic whooshing sounds and a chain of instructions coming from the truck and along the side of the house and down to the basement. Everybody working on the project had a cellphone, but the way they did it was probably faster.

In time they finished, coiled up their hoses, took away their buckets, rolled up the tarps they'd made a path of through the front of the house, and departed. In one final surreal moment, the head plumber told me that he had the city paperwork, and that it needed to be notarized. I could either sign it and then go find a notary and get that done and send it to the office, OR he could have me sign it and then take a cellphone photo of me holding up the signed form and my state ID, and they would show that to the notary at their office and I wouldn't have to do anything else. I had vague sleep-deprived thoughts of somehow enabling identity theft by this process, but going out on the icy streets with a recovering ankle was not at all appealing, and we'd trusted them to re-line our sewer pipe; so I agreed to the photo. It felt like getting a mug shot.

Then I thanked them and they departed and I let the cats out. Lydy had gone to bed, though I don't know how well she'd slept. The whooshing wasn't that loud, so perhaps it was all right. I went upstairs and failed to get anything done for the rest of the day. Even cleaning out my email inboxes seemed a bridge too far. I did read Anthony Price, but ended up having to reread it all when I'd had more sleep. (And of all the bizarre fairies to have revisited this time, what in the world does he have against dogs? I hadn't even thought there would be an anti-dog fairy.)

I slipped into the basement to look at the work. Instead of a pit full of sand, with an ancient wooden trap over it, there was a neat patch of new cement with a cleanout in it. They had indeed moved the saw table into the niche emptied for it, but they hadn't put it back. David wasn't worried about that, though, so I'm not either.

Last fall we had to get the leaky roof patched, so I now feel that at least the top and the bottom of the house are secure. When I told this to people, they generally said cheerfully, "And now the middle can start breaking!"

Last Tuesday, the upstairs bathtub faucet, which has been leaking -- well, to be honest, spraying -- water from around the hot tap for some months, decided that it would no longer turn all the way off. This has now been addressed; and I hope nothing else will go sideways for a little while.

I hope this minor saga has at least been a distraction from the horrors of our government.

Pamela