Flip This House #3

Parent Cafe
1261

<p>FLASH UPDATE!</p>

<p>My Job is So Glamorous!!!
I think this one tops the cake of disgustingness</p>

<p>WARNING - subject is graphic and you may not want to read this while enjoying a Snickers Bar!!!</p>

<p>This morning I was at Lowe’s pulling the new front door and all of the new doors for the house. I get a frantic phone call from my lead carpenter. He is livid, he is pissed, he is using language that I have never heard before. He has worked with me for 4 years and I have never heard one swear word or one fit of anger ever. I could not understand him and I could not figure out what he was trying to tell me. As usual, he started the conversation with “We have a big problem”, but I hear that almost daily.</p>

<p>Turns out he was under the house starting to do the copper plumbing for the bathroom. He stepped right in a pile of diarrhea poop located way back in a far corner under the house! I kept asking him… “Are you sure it is not animal droppings??” He responded with “I don’t think the local skunks use paper towels to wipe themselves” :)</p>

<p>He was so pissed that someone would do this. He immediately started doing detective work trying to isolate the timeframe of this criminal act. I have no idea why someone needed to use the dirt under the house… we actually have a functioning toilet. I guess someone thought he (note that I have determined it was a HE) was going to mess everything up and create a stink and they were too embarrassed. </p>

<p>Then he started interrogating everyone… Does he really think someone is going to answer “Oh yeah, I pooped under the house” ? He even went so far as to start calling all the roofing guys that were here for about 1 hour on Sunday.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, I am standing with the door salesman at the store and he hears the whole conversation. He just cannot stop busting out laughing. I told him that he was going to have a very good day compared to me.</p>

<p>Returned to the job and took the lead outside. I told him that there is just no way we are ever going to definitely know who did it. But, I explained that there has been an incident before with one of the regular workers - but I had not shared it with my carpenter. I kept quiet about it because it was too embarrassing for the worker. I calmed him down and told him we are just going to have to pretend it was a homeless person (which is impossible because everything is padlocked… and how did the homeless person get paper towels??). </p>

<p>He knows for sure that it wasn’t me because I barely use the toilet, I’m always driving down the street.</p>

<p>My big job today is trying to decide WHO gets to go under the house and clean up this mess. My carpenter made it clear that it’s not as simple as going down with a doggie plastic bag - it’s all over the place. All I know is my big excuse today is “Sorry guys, I can’t go down there, I’m wearing white pants”. </p>

1262

<p>Get a bag of powdered lime (the stuff you put on your lawn), and dump it liberally. This will neutralize the odor. Then bury it.</p>

1263

<p>Oh my!!! Wow. The plot thickens… Poop detectives! Cb, hang in there! I would offer my help since I’m trained in hazmat cleanup, but I’m a bit too far from your place. :)</p>

1264

<p>Don’t have a bag of lime, but we’ve got a bag of cement mix. It’s probably got lime in it :slight_smile: Good idea to try to just neutralize it </p>

1265

<p>Eh… maybe cement will work. Lime is calcium carbonate, the stuff in cement I believe is calcium oxide.</p>

1266

<p>You can use bleach if you have it, but beware that the stench will get worse before it gets better! </p>

1267

<p>Oh my gosh. I have no ideas and no solutions, but just – oh my gosh. Hugs to coralbrook. (But no hugs if you’ve been under the house.)</p>

1268

<p>OMG, that is one of the funniest things I have read. I needed a good laugh. ( I’m sure it’s not funny for you, but OMG - you should write a book about all this, maybe you can recoup some of these extra expenses - call it the flip from hell)</p>

1269

<p>Years ago, someone in the building trades told me about something that befell a certain famous female novelist. (This was in the Weston/Westport area of CT.) Apparently, she had had an addition put on her house. As time went on, it began to reek. Really, really badly. This guy was called in to look at it. He discovered that whoever did the plumbing hadn’t hooked up the toilet to the house sewage line. So raw sewage had been pouring into the crawl space under the addition.</p>

<p>Eventually someone fixed it. But first there was a cleanup effort that involved dumping gallons and gallons of bleach in the crawl space…</p>

1270

<p>Of course, the team decided that the sewage needed to ‘dry out’ and they couldn’t possibly address the situation until they return after Christmas break. They are taking Wednesday and Thursday off this week. Since there is plenty of head room in the specific nuclear zone, I’m going to have them dig a hole, shovel everything into it and pour some bleach before they cover up the hole. </p>

1271

<p>I’m sure the famous novelist had the addition permitted. Warning… just because there’s a permit doesn’t mean everything is perfect and wonderful :slight_smile: Everyone puts too much stock in ‘permitted’. However, that is one of the worst plumbing boo boos I’ve heard of :slight_smile: </p>

1272

<p>Cb, EXACTLY 15 years ago about this time Mr B and I were shopping at HD for a snake. I will tell the rest of the story in a few minutes when I get home from Trader Joe’s. :)</p>

1273

<p>Lime will work much better than bleach, grab a bag from HD.</p>

1274

<p>@BunsenBurner, that must be quite a trip to Trader Joe’s. </p>

1275

<p>Where is the story about the snake!?!?! She forgot about us after TJ’s. </p>

1276

<p>Sorry guys! :slight_smile: Had to take care of a bunch of cranky humans and felines. Switching to my laptop now, so the story is coming. :)</p>

1277

<p>Here it is… not to derail CB’s thread, but it is related to crawl spaces and plumbing woes - and inspections and permits (especially!!!) that do not guarantee that everything will be fine (CB and I share a common perspective on those :wink: ).</p>

<p>T’was the night before Chrismas Eve 1999. The Bunsen family moved - finally! - into their newly constructed house in the boonies. It only took me a few calls to the City hall and a couple of threats to involve KING5 and the like to get a CofO issued on the house. I was so angry when the guy who was too busy to sign a piece of paper (with all inspections long done and signed off!) and was giving me yet another run around that I promised him that I would camp on the Gity hall steps, and that a local TV station would air a segment on how the local red tape treats their taxpayers. Imagine that - he immediately pulled up the file and send someone down the street to staple the signed CofO copy on the wall in the garage! So we gathered our scattered belongings and moved form the motel to the house… Phew… Not!</p>

<p>The construction of the house somewhat resembled CB’s current woes. The lot where the house sits is a part of a former 6-acre horse pasture. When the general contractor (GC) bough the place, neighbors, all avid horse owners, protested the sale and said that they did not want this “huge development” of 5 homes in their neck of the woods. So he had to deal with nosy neighbors peeking into every bit and corner and ratting everything they though was not up to their liking to the City. Despite that, the construction moved along. In late July, we saw the house, fell in love with the area, and decided to make an offer. The GC said that it would take him 3 months to finish the place, but to be safe, we had better planned on moving in 4 months. Little did we know that the project would be delayed even longer due to such remote, unforeseen things as the WTO meeting in Seattle! Apparently, one of the subs was protesting in the crowds and could not come to finish some of the work. Then one other sub was bitten by the dog belonging to another sub, a scuffle erupted, and the GC had to schedule these two on non-overlapping shifts… Sigh… Plus, the neighbors insisted on certain land improvements that made no sense but had to be done so the neighbors would go away. It was 2 days before Christmas when we finally got to move in! We already sold our place and had to hang out at a rathole motel because all decent hotels had been full!</p>

<p>So I was standing in the downstairs powder room, and baby kiddo a floor above me flushed her toilet. I heard the rush of water coming down the pipes, and then of a sudden the toilet next to me started to flood! There must be some blocked pipe down there! It was already past 9, so no possibility the builder or any of his subs would answer the phone. Mr. B went into the crawl space to check for any leaks or issues, and there were none. After a few futile calls to plumbers, we headed out to HD and got a bunch of plungers, a snake, and a few buckets trying to deal with the problem. Snaking the toilet did not lead to any clues - the entire snake went in without any issues. So we needed a longer snake! Off to HD Mr. went to get the longest snake possible. OK, he came back, and then decided that it would be easier to try to snake the pipe from the other end. </p>

<p>So instead of baking Christmas cookies, I’m crawling with Mr. in the yard and in the basement! Since the septic tank was not yet completely buried, we took off the lid and tried the trick from that end. The entire 50 feet of the snake went in!!! Where the bleep was that blockage?! Then Mr. heard something really strange - the snake rattling against plastic in the crawl space, like it was not inside the pipe at all! He disappeared in the crawl space for 10 minutes, then came back and said, “I need the longest screwdriver you can find!” What the heck! I found the tool box, and he went in again, armed with a mega screwdriver. In about 5 minutes I heard water rushing down the pipes, and then Mr. emerged from the hole in the closet victoriously holding a piece of plastic threaded onto the screwdriver! </p>

<p>It turns out that the inspectors did not completely take out the membrane that was used to block the pipe for pressure-testing the plumbing system! They simply poked a small hole in it when they were done, so when baby kiddo used half of a roll of toilet paper “in one sitting”, like she usually did at that age, the paper blocked the hole, and the pipes between the membrane and the baby kiddo’s room backed up (that’s why I was able to use the kitchen sink just fine). It could have been much worse, since the test used 2 such membranes, one on each side of a plastic tee in the pipe (to pressure test both sides of the system), and the top of the pipe was not capped - in addition to not removing the membrane, the inspectors forgot to cap it when they were done! So if they had not removed the <em>other</em> membrane on the other side of the tee, the stuff would have flown freely through the top of the tee and into the crawl space! We were lucky that we did not end up like the lady in Consolation’s story! Yikes. The GC was livid at the inspectors and apologized big time. But we did have a merry Christmas in the new house - with working toilets and all! :)</p>

<p>Inspections, permits, certificates… “trust but verify” is my motto with those.</p>

1278

<p>Does Mr. B have any friends like him that he can set me up with? ;-)</p>

1279

<p>Lemme ask! :)</p>

<p>Hope CB has a few nice days with her family and comes back recharged and finishes the project as fast as she can!</p>

1280

<p>I’m beginning to think cb’s house is haunted.</p>