All of life's great expressions are on a magnet, right? One of my favorite truisms I learned on a magnet in the gift shop at the Portland, Maine airport: "Maine: You can't get there from here." Oh it is soooo true. No matter where you're going, it will take you all day to get there and you'll have to change planes at least once. So I planned this 25 day trip to take advantage of the fact that I was already going to be out of state and to take advantage of some really good fares on Southwest Airlines (which doesn't charge extra for one-way segments). Since I was going to the 30th Reunion at Hollins, I might as well keep on going and that's how I got to a week in Albuquerque and now a week in Dallas. Bonus: The travel expenses for the week in Dallas are tax-deductible because I'm a landlady checking up on my property.
Little did I know when I planned the trip many months ago that the landlady would really have to invest a lot of time in her work. The sewer pipe on my house finally collapsed. I knew 10 years ago when we did a makeshift (and cheaper) repair, that some day I would have to replace the rest of the pipe. The time was now. Fortunately, Mary the renter, did all the prep work of figuring out there was a problem, calling in folks to determine the problem, and getting bids on fixing the problem. The winning bidder was my favorite plumbing company that's worked on the house for all 25 years that I've owned it.
Here you can see that they've dug the trench down to the collapsed pipe and put all the dirt next to the trench for use after the replacement. The little white pipes perpendicular to the trench are the sprinklers. Though there was no guarantee that the sprinklers wouldn't get damaged in the process, a little luck and a lot of talent from the guys doing the digging resulted in zero damage to my sprinkler system.
This could've been a problem but it wasn't. The old pipe is located under the storage shed. However, there was a 45 degree turn in the old pipe to get it to the city pipe, so we just put in a new turn. There's no need to dig up the old pipe, the real purpose to all this is to put in new pipe.
Here's the collapsed pipe. Looks pretty collapsed, eh? It's a type of pipe made of wood fiber with tar in it called Orangeburg that was very popular in the 1950's. Turns out it was popular since the 1890's! Anyway, that's what I had and that's what I replaced.
Here's a new cleanout going in. This is what I replaced 10 years ago in my "temporary" fix. They told me at the time that inevitably I was going to have to replace the rest of the pipe, that it could be anywhere from 1 to 10 years. Shwew! I got the good end of that deal! And now it's tax deductible as a repair on my investment property. Here's the new pipe going in:
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