Home Sweet Home

(Warning: Most of my posts are about programming. Not this one. This is not a post to read during your lunch break, afternoon snack, FourthMeal ™, etc.)

When I was about six years old I had decided that I loved to draw. My mother, seeing a budding artist, encouraged me to no end. I would scribble little drawings and then show her. Invariably she would tell me that she liked my drawing and maybe ask what things were in the picture. But I remember this one time when I was very bored and for reasons I won’t go into in this post, I had no place to go outside and play. So I was six  years old, bored, and had a pencil and paper. And a devious sense of humor.

On this one particular day I was suddenly struck with inspiration. I sketched out my picture quickly, giggling at my creation the whole time. When it was done I ran right off to my mom to show her what I had drawn. Smiling, she picked up the paper to take a look.

I think I knew something was wrong when I saw her jaw drop and the blood rush out of her face. And then I saw the blood rush back until her face was red. See, I had drawn a lovely scene: A smiling stick figure, on a toilet, with a giant tail of poo crawling out of the toilet and around the page. On the wall next to the person could be seen a sign which read: “Toilet, Sweet Toilet”.

Needless to say, I didn’t get my pencil and paper back for a few days. My point?  Well, my sense of humor has grown up since I was six but my tendency toward dark or gross humor has remained the same. So I hope you will appreciate the great restraint I have used in relating the following story to you.

When I think about owning a house, most of the time I kick myself that I didn’t buy a place back in the late 90s when I probably could have swung it and would have caught the early wave of the housing bubble. Reality usually settles in though. I remind myself that I often make dumb money decisions. That means I probably would now be upside down on some piece of sub-par suburbia with a crazy ARM mortgage that I’d have talked myself into and generally hating life. And then there is my whole rant about how most homeowners don’t really own shit, than the bank owns their house and their future, and that modern American home ownership is a socio-economic trap on par with sharecropping or indentured servitude. Even so, I’ve gotta say that most of the time when I think about owning vs. renting, I can say I definitely wish I owned my own home.

Not this week. This week I am flat-out grateful that I don’t own a home.

Why? Because I don’t have the pay the plumbing bill. It turns out that this lovely old house, with its well built, farmhouse-meets-craftsman style, high ceilings, and pseudo-wood floors, has been sitting on a huge pile of shit. For quite a while.

When we toured the house in December I thought I smelled a little something. But I thought maybe there was a horse stable nearby.We’re in the kind of area where a horse corral next door wouldn’t be that unusual. Not being familiar with the neighborhood I didn’t think much of it.

After we moved in we started to smell something in certain rooms. It was a phantom smell which would only appear at certain unpredictable times.  We complained to the landlord, but since we couldn’t pin it down very specifically and we weren’t nagging about it I guess she didn’t take it too seriously. It was annoying but honestly we didn’t know what to make of it.

Many months passed and the smell would come and go, always mild, always smelling like horses or cows or something like that. And we wondered.

Finally, a plumber came out this week. He was supposed to check out a clogged bathtub drain, but as a side note the landlord had asked him to check out that smell we’d been talking about for months.

Our house sits on a block foundation, which means there is a crawlspace underneath. The moment the plumber got a whiff of the smell he wanted to go under and investigate. (And God bless him, because I sure as hell wasn’t doing that.) He came back up practically laughing.

See, the house we’re in had an addition built sometime in the past 20 years or so. It’s a small extension to the house, with a toilet and sink, plus the washer and dryer. Apparently whoever did the plumbing for the addition back then wasn’t what you’d call a “detail oriented” type. See, the drain pipe that he added on (and I’m going to assume it was a He), was never capped at the end.

Get that? The end of the  drain pipe – the pipe that takes everything out to the sewer – was wide open. Apparently it was that way ever since that addition was built 15-20 years ago. So let’s do the math here… open sewer line plus toilet, sink, washing machine, and adjacent kitchen, plus 15-20 years = ? Yup, a big old pile of crap under the house. The plumber said it looked like the bottom of an outhouse down there. Nice!

Bonus: This old house used to have cast iron piping. Most of which had been replaced, but apparently one leg of the main line out to the sewer was still cast iron. And what happens to cast iron when you mix it with water, kids? Yup, rust. Which it had. A big old hole had rusted out of that section of pipe, in mid-air, under a whole other section of the house. So if you’re keeping track we had not one, but TWO places where shit was falling out of pipes and piling up under the house.

Added bonus: The line to the sewer was also clogged. Which meant that everything we thought we were flushing was instead backing up into the crawlspace. The plumber was amazed we didn’t have a 4-inch deep puddle of sewage under the house. I guess the dirt here drains well or something. I’d really rather not think about it.

So, as you might imagine, we spent the week in a hotel. A special cleaning crew came in and removed all of the “debris” from the crawlspace, then they fumigated and cleaned and deodorized and fumigated some more. They ran a giant HEPA-filtered air mover in the house for days. And the plumber did his thing.

And now, finally, at the end of the week we are back home. And things seem fine. But I have learned one hell of a lesson for when we do buy a house: Always get the plumbing checked out. Twice. Maybe three times.

If you made it this far through this nasty story, I have a present for you. I was looking on YouTube for video of the Golgothan from Dogma. Sadly that turns out to be the one clip YouTube doesn’t have. However, they did have this clip of Kevin Smith talking at Cornell. It’s funnier than the Golgothan: