april 15th, tax day! except it’s not, luckily. we did the bulk of the work on the taxes, but they need to be filed, by monday.
i’ve been busy, i’ve been gone, i’ve been more busy. i started writing this post, for example, at about eight in the morning. it’s now 7:15 at night and i’m soooo tired from my much too busy day…but we did get six giant scoops of mulch, so i’m excited about that! i’ll try not to spread it around all at once in order not to permanently destroy my back.
way back in march, we had a final sewer failure. because the main part of our house was built in the 30’s, one of the original little one bedroom lake cottages when the lake was first built, the outside underground sewer pipes are from the 30’s. made of clay. very bad, the clay, and we’ve had an ongoing problem with them, had people come out to unclog them, then kevin got some kind of hose tool thing to do it himself, and we managed to limp along…but then, one sunday evening a couple weeks ago i did a load of laundry and a pool of water collected in the sewer drain. kevin had just had his eye surgery so he didn’t go near the drain, but instructed me how to stick the hose down inside and pump…but nothing happened. uh oh. it had finally given out.
it being sunday evening, we had to pay a premium to get a guy to come over and fix it, but he did arrive promptly. that’s the good news. the bad news, though, is that the pipe had probably collapsed and another guy was going to come to the house on monday to assess the situation.
the monday guy took a video of the inside of the pipe and we could clearly see that the roots from our very old and dying small red bud tree had eaten away at the sewer pipe outside the house. the pipe had been clogged with mud because of the big hole. oh boy. so, the guys all came back early wednesday morning, march 23rd, to dig out the old section of clay pipe and replace it with whatever new thing that pipes are made of nowadays. they’d have to dig up the tree, and they were going to bring in a backhoe at eight a.m.
the first guy showed up at about 7:20 – i looked out mybathroom window and saw a guy driving a backhoe down the lane, and i figured nobody else around here had ordered one for the day.
i ran out the back to document how it looked before they moved in. it’s not the prettiest area of our house, that’s for sure. but i’ve always like the forsythia bushes, except that the roses of sharon bushes were increasingly encroaching on them and taking over.
also, last year i planted a bunch of hostas there in front of the window, and i mulched it and made it look pretty good. but since that’s the place they were going to dig, i dug up all the hostas on tuesday night. it wasn’t so bad because we’d had a lot of rain. i dug up six of them. you can see the holes.
here’s the first guy, getting read to take out the gate.
i stacked these bricks next to my bleeding heart so they wouldn’t destroy it, and told them about it.
while i was at it, digging up the hostas, i also had to move a bunch of logs. because of kevin’s surgery, he wasn’t allowed to lift anything heavy, so the onus was all on me. i decided to hurl the logs over the fence so lester would have a new jungle gym kind of thing. not that he’s spoiled. luckily most of the logs were pretty dry and not so heavy, really, but my goodness that was a lot of work.
here’s my wagon full of hosts, which were so tiny that i don’t think you can even see them.
the backhoe guy, plucking the fence post out of the ground like it was nothing! kevin was so excited about the backhoe that he told me he wants one for his birthday. i’m saving up for it.
i took lots of photos of them scooping up the forsythia, but because i was inside you can’t see it so well. it was all so fast, the scooping up of everything.
and then the one guy sawed away at the vexing red bud tree…
…and then the backhoe guy picked it right up! i see why kevin wants one, but i’m not exactly sure what he’d do with it.
here’s the fence post.
and then they ran into a little problem – they couldn’t find the pipe. the guy had found it on monday, with some kind of gizmo thing, but then when they dug, it just wasn’t there. that guy on the right is doing something with his phone to find it i think, or maybe he was calling another guy. the guy on the left is jamming that rod thing into the ground, trying in vain to find the dang pipe.
i took the first photo of the guy standing at the gate at 8:07 a.m., and this was just 8:31. boy they were fast. but then everything ground to a halt because they couldn’t locate it.
they left everything there while they waited for one of the high-up guys to come over and find it. this was the first trough, but by the time they were done, they’d dug up a lot more than anybody thought they would. i had to leave, unfortunately, but kevin said that after the guy finally found the pipe, he had to step on the backhoe to get a ride up to the surface of the earth, he was so far down! how exciting.
unfortunately, there were a couple more hostas and a fern or two that i hadn’t saved.
because i pointed out my bleeding heart, they didn’t touch it – but when they were moving the bricks, they put a brick right on top of my other tiny little bleeding heart! but luckily i removed it when they took a break, and it’s doing fine now.
that is a very big pile of dirt.
all the dug-up forsythia, which we would have to put back.
here’s the guy in the hole! isn’t that crazy??? we could have built an addition to the basement down there!
i missed the dramatic conclusion, where they found the pipe and removed it and replaced it. it was mike williams plumbing, and whenever i mentioned mike williams to anybody, everybody said “they’re really expensive,” never anything about the quality of work. but they were nice guys, they were fast, they finally found the pipe, and (knock on wood), we’ve had no more bad things backing up and floating out of our sewer drain!
here’s the moon that night.
i took this two days later, before we started to work on all the re-planting.
i have many photos of all our progress thus far, but they’ll have to wait. i’m still sitting here typing at 7:45 on friday night, and i need to do some serious, serious chillaxing.
have a great weekend,
mrs. incredibly productive for at least one day out of the year hughes.