nerd’s eye view

Halloween House of Horrors

November 1, 2006 – 6:53 am | by nerd's eye view

Update 7/17/2007: I’ve since sold the condo, but this is still a tale of horror. Plus, while I do appreciate distributed repair costs, making decisions with a contentious group of humans takes its own toll. 

Two guys showed up on the front porch last night. Dressed in dark blue work clothes with name patches over the pockets and heavy boots, they were perfectly costumed as sewer repair guys. Oh, wait. They were sewer repair guys. They’d come to do the annual service on our aging line. They lugged a bunch of equiptment into our narrow back garden and punched the jet through the line in to the yard, spraying water all over my neighbor’s house. I know this because my downstairs neighbor rang my doorbell. “Put on a jacket and come outside,” he said, “you gotta see this.”

800 dollars later, the guys had confirmed that line was indeed broken and also, blocked further down. This isn’t a surprise, we’ve known about the compromised sewer line for some time now. The last guy to service the line warned us that we’d only be able to do this so many times before we damaged the integrity of the 90 year old ceramic pipe. It’s a drag that it happened on the freezing cold night of Halloween and it’s a bigger drag that it’s going to cost us, collectively, a minimum of 5000 dollars to fix.

This morning, the sewer guys are coming back to dig up our yard. They’ll jackhammer part of the sidewalk and tear up a section of our landscaping to spot repair the break in the line. Once that bit is fixed, they’ll check out the other place in the line that’s blocked and let us know if it’s not going to cost us another 5k to get that part repaired. Update, noon. Homeowner’s association MADNESS! Red faced shouting neighbors! Repairs delayed because of shouting homeowners! It’s like pro-wrestling round here! It’s money we didn’t want to spend that way - we’d just booked a contractor for carpentry repairs. For completely obvious reasons, the sewer line comes first.

This painful repair reminds me why it’s a good idea to live in communally owned property. I’d be howling if I had to pay for this out of my own pocket. I know exactly where my homeowners dues are going, that’s for sure. If there’s anything scarier than looking down your own sewer line and then, being faced with a 5k repair estimate, I don’t want to know about it.

Update, Monday, Noon: There’s tiny backhoe digging up the sidewalk. It took them forever to get started because the rain gutter of the corner house - you see the porch in this photo - was pouring water directly on to the site where the guys wanted to dig. They had to gerryrig a system to reroute the rain off the site and in to the space between my house and the porch. I’m scared of what they’re going to find down there…
Nerd’s Eye View can’t stop eating the Butterfinger Crisp mini candy bars from the Halloween giveaway bowl. Turn out at my house was so low that I am sitting on enough candy to create a Mongol hoard out of a second grade classroom. I gotta stop buying candy for Halloween. That’ll bring the kids back to my house.

True story. After buying candy, I was walking past the coffee house and a handsome stranger in cool specs and dreads said this to me: Trick or treat! Trick or treat! Did I give him some of my Butterfingers? What do you think?
[tags]Halloween, sewer repair[/tags]