We have seen other houses in the neighborhood have their sewer lines get replaced, and although it is quite invasive, it didn’t look too crazy. Our house however, sits on a corner lot and has a sidewalk running along the north side, the same side our sewer line goes. The old sewer line ran from the house, under the sidewalk, and back to the alley. We had also previously built two separate retaining walls along this side of the house, and over where a decent portion of the sewer line ran. Just to complicate things.
The plan for the sewer replacement was to cut and abandon the old clay pipe sewer line and create a new PVC sewer line with 3 clean outs. It was going to be cheaper to run the new sewer line differently than the old one. Sidewalks are pretty damn expensive to replace apparently, and tearing down our retaining walls only to rebuild them sounded like a horrible proposition. So…the new line was going to run out of the house, under a our most recently built retaining wall (a small section had to be taken down and re-built. F!!), into the tree belt (a.k.a “hell strip”) where it would take a 90 degree turn to the west. It would run under the hell strip for about 25 feet (some of which we had recently poured a concrete pad on and had to break up for this), then take a 45 degree turn back under the sidewalk, and under the section of driveway that’s closest to our garage. Then it will run under the alley and meet the city’s line. There was a lot of digging. Very impressive!
Running the new sewer line only took about 4 days from start to finish. Sorry neighbors for having to shut the alley down that long! Sewer Lines Only did a really good job overall, However, the first go at the concrete that was poured to replace what was broken up didn’t turn out that great. The work wasn’t very even in spots and was sloppy. When we brought this to the attention of the people at Sewer Lines Only, they had it all redone within a week. We were also able to get our entire driveway re-poured at the same time as well so it worked out pretty well.
This was a big project in and of itself, but for our GD Pop Top, it was just another step to even get to where we could even submit for a building permit.
That's a lot of digging. What a pain in the ass.
Thank you sweet baby Jesus insurance covered this nonsense. HA!
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