The Hole 2

This is your condo on crack:


Click on the image to see the full photoset with comments including pictures from when I first tore out the carpet. Apparently 7 hours gets you a giant hole, cutting out a pipe, and making a video. I think I'm estimating my projects wrong.

Bob is supposed to call me tonight and let me know if I'm staying home again tomorrow.

The Hole

We finally got a quote yesterday - $3390, plus $2400 for work that only applies to me, fixing the connection from my bathroom to the main line, and adding an access port. They guys got here around 10. First, they tried to break the floor with a sledgehammer. That apparently didn't work, so they brought in a jackhammer. In case you were curious, a jackhammer in a 2 bedroom condo is really really load. The walls do nothing!

Judging by the stench, they have the main sewer line open. It sounds like they need to replace a bunch of the pipe. They showed me earlier, and there were some pretty big roots growing into that joint, which is fantastic. I'm amazed that the tree out front is burrowing close to 40 feet under my house. That's something to keep you up at night.

Not sure how much longer they can stay, I'm hoping I don't have an open sewer in here overnight. We'll see.

The Delay

It's been almost a week, no quote from the plumber yet. This is really annoying. I think he promised it Friday last week.

The Result

So, Bob finally came super-late, more like 5 than 2 as promised. There's something in the pipe, but it doesn't seem to be tree roots, or at least not all tree roots. Either something hard fell into the stack, or (and this is really bizarre) the stack itself has dropped several inches and is resting on the bottom of the main sewage line. He wants to dig up the floor and tear out the wall, take the pipe apart and figure out what's going on.

There's strong indication that whoever converted the place to condos did a sloppy job - the line from my toilet to the main line isn't really connected at the end, just sort of sticking out into the main pipe - this needs to be fixed too. He also wants to add an access point in my bathroom, which sounds like tearing up tiles, doing plumbing work, and then leaving behind some sort of metal plate that could be opened up when they need to maintain the system. This sounds awful. He'll be sending us an estimate of all our options soon, hopefully today.

Bottom line - nobody's going to be using that bedroom for awhile. We're going to offer our main bedroom to two of the guests that are coming, K and I will have a slumber party with the third in the living room.

Bob drew some diagrams on our wall, since it's coming down anyway. I'll take a picture and post it, it's pretty funny in a tragic sort of way.

The Storage Unit

From the new hole in the wall, we could tell that the access to the main sewage pipe was inside a storage unit somewhere. There's a mysterious door that no-one seems to have access to. I don't have a storage unit, the president's units are accounted for, the key to unit 1 doesn't work. Finally, my fiance K tries the main door key, and it opens.



This appears to be stuff for the whole condo. Poor K had to clear out a path in the middle for the plumbers.

The Contractor

So, we get two names. Unit 2 has a friend, who will do it at cost, and will come look at it for free. He comes, and he's fine, an old-school kind of plumber. He says the same thing - we need to cut open the floor and just see what there is to see. I'm not wild about exploratory surgery that requires a giant carbide-steel cement cutter, but maybe I'm being a wuss.

The president digs through the paperwork she has, and calls the company that's been out before for other issues, more sewer problems, but not exactly like this. In fact, this company was the last one that came out, in 2005. Bob's report is a thing of beauty, 2 pages of dense 8-point plumbing jargon, describing not just the problem and solution, but with recommendations of things to do to keep our crap flowing freely. Obviously, none of these things were ever done. He comes out in the evening, and from his memory and copious notes tells us more about the problem and our building than all of us knew collectively. He looks at the building, goes in the bedroom, punches a hole in the wall and totally nails the access point that none of us knew existed. This is the guy.

"How much?" we ask, tentatively. I'm ready to take out a home equity loan if that's what it takes, but there's always hope. He starts talking about dropping a camera in, checking damage, routing from both ends ... only about $500. If the pipe needs to be replaced ... about $2000.

This is definitely the guy. He should be starting around 2 this afternoon.

The Discovery

Many frantic phone calls later, and the following facts emerged. This is not for the squeamish:

• The main sewer line was clogged somewhere. Whenever units 1, 2 and 3 flushed their master bathroom toilets, sewage backed up in unit 1's toilet and tub, flooded the bathroom, and dripped through the floor. What I was seeing had dripped through their floor and out my ceiling.
• Unit 1's handyman had tried to route out the system, breaking 1 or 2 router bits in the process. The pipe may be collapsed. The other units are told not to use that bathroom.
• The handyman recommends that we cut out the cement floor in my unit, break the pipe, check for damage, and replace the ceramic pipe with PVC. Cost: $2000.
• We find out that for awhile, the previous owners had been hiring people to route the sewage lines every 6 months. The last receipt that the new president can find is from 2005.
• None of this was disclosed when I bought the property.

An emergency meeting of the condo board is called. We moved it into my condo since I'm the only one that doesn't have renters. The guy from unit 1 wanders around not finding us, not calling us, and finally shows up an hour later annoyed that we've moved the meeting inside out of the rain. At this point, he's the only one who can vouch for the handyman, and the handyman has left without us being able to talk to him. We agree to go with this guy, but want to know if he has references from other jobs, and insurance. Something along the lines of "G did a great job of opening up a raw sewer line in our condo" would be fine.

The next day A, the condo president, calls the handyman to ask for references and insurance info. The handyman decides that he's not interested in the job after all. Now we're stuck finding a contractor at the last minute, the week before we leave town for a wedding.

The Beginning.

The primary purpose of this blog is to channel my frustration with my new condo into something somewhat constructive, and hopefully amuse some people at the same time. So, let's start at the beginning.

I recently bought a condo in Andersonville. In order to get a bigger space, and because I don't tend to look out the window much, I settled on a "garden" unit. People who have been in Chicago more than 12 days know that "garden" is simply a nice way to say "finished basement with its own door." So I knew going in that I would have to deal with any and all problems that basements tend to have, which usually boils down to the physics truism that water always seeks the lowest point possible.

Three weeks after moving in, a friend came to stay and slept in the guest bedroom. A couple of days after he left, my fiance and I noticed that the bed in there was completely soaked. There were no water marks on the ceiling, no dripping going on right then - totally weird. Well, you can't fix an error if you can't recreate it, so we just kept an eye on it.

A couple of days later we caught it - brown water dripping out of the ceiling vent. And yeah, it smelled like sewage. And it was soaking the futon, and soaking the carpet.

And that's how it began, 3 weeks after moving in.