Plumbing Plunders

Well this may get a little long winded as our plumbing problems have been on going for a long time. For those of you who don't know we built a brand new house and moved in April 14th, 2006 so it's less than a year old. This past summer I noticed that our toilets and sinks gurgled often and in August I called the builder to send the plumbers out under our 1yr warranty to check it out. They came and basically made me feel like I was hallucinating. They said they cleaned the lines and there wasn't anything suspicious so if they gurgled again to give them a call and they would come back out, but if they were REALLY gurgling the problem would mean tearing into our foundation and we wouldn't want that now would we.

No, I didn't want that so when they started gurgling again in the fall I just ignored it as the plumber said it wasn't really an issue. Well in February 2007 it could no longer be ignored as sewage started coming up the drains in our shower and bathtubs!!! I called the builder and explained the whole story. His warranty with the original plumber was expired since the plumbing was laid before the foundation was poured in November 2005. I said that was fine and dandy, but we were covered under the building warranty until April 14th 2007. He agreed and sent his new plumber out to investigate the problem. Glen is a great plumber and was very patient and explained all the things he was looking at. He cleaned out the drains as the original plumber had done in August, but then he sent a video line through our pipes and that revealed some very disgusting and nasty looking pipes as they have been holding water and waste for almost a year. There were sections of the pipe that were completely full of water even after flushing the lines!!! The problem could only be solved by tearing up my floor and jackhammering into the foundation.

I lost a lot of sleep and developed an anxiety breathing problem as we were now dealing with two different builders and two different plumbers and there was bound to be a lawsuit somewhere. Well the original builder and the builder that picked up our house part way through construction worked together and they got Glen (the good plumber) and his crew to come out to our house to fix it. They originally thought it would just be 2 small holes in the floor. One in our master bedroom and one in the guest bathroom.

Here is a picture of the "small" hole in our bedroom. Once they got into the floor the problem was bigger than expected. Isn't it always!?!

Well it turns out the problem was a LOT bigger than expected and they had to replace about 75%-80% of the plumbing which meant a whole lot of my floor got torn up. The jackhammer was so loud I had to get the boys out of the house and Daniel had to get 2.5 days off work to stay home and supervise the work. Thankfully we were able to get rooms at the base to stay in and keep the boys out of all the FUN construction.

Here is a picture of our hallway

The project ended up in the front yard. Here is a picture

All the jackhammering stirred up quite a lot of dust as you can imagine. They were able to get all the carpet re-installed and we are still waiting on retiling the bathroom and a small section of the laundry room. Daniel spent ALL day Saturday vacuuming and cleaing up dust in the bedroom and the boys bedroom so we could come home and be able to breathe. We have been working all week on cleaning up the dust and are almost back to normal. Here are some pictures of the mess.