A crappy afternoon
So we’re in the middle of this horrible project to slightly (ever so slightly!)raise up the back of the house and replace the rotten beam that has been sitting on dirt for 80 years. I’ll go into all of that later, but you can see from the photo, that is has been a long arduous, dust and dirt filled job. NONETHELESS, another fun components of this never-ending house torture is that our septic pipe runs right through it.
So in order to get under the house, we need to dig a crawl space.. AND dig under the septic pipe.
We hadn’t gone to far into our digging when we found that a 2″ thick root had sidled right up to this pipe, and had morphed the pipe into more of an oblong (instead of round) shape for a portion of the pipe. Now, you might be thinking, were did this root come from? Not sure.. but your guess is as good as might. It could have come from the front yard, or the backyard… but either way.. it traveled a good 20 feet to reach that pipe. Gross.
So this bend in the pipe caused a small leak. And a small leak from a septic pipe is just not what anyone wants. So we rigged up a temporary solution, without removing the root, and wrapped it in plastic flagging, then sealed it with a full tube of silicone seal. It still leaked a tiny tiny bit, but nothing we couldn’t wrap a rag around while we were working.
So one day we had to dig a bit deeper to actually start to crawl under the house, when we decided to just get that root out of the way, so we cut and pulled and finally broke it loose and that was that.
Well. That was that until someone flushed our only toilet. And water just came POURING out of a 2″ round hole in the pipe!
We had not realized until that moment that the root had not only sidled up to the pip, but it was actually running through the pipe too.., yuck.
Well, like I said. That’s our only toilet. And of course it was a Sunday afternoon… so we had to do something.
Running to the barn to try to find some kind of glue, plastic wrap, or something, Matt found an old 4′ irrigation pipe that he was able to cut lengthwise, and kind of hamburger it on top of the existing pipe. Remember, that I said that the pipe was no longer round, so this wasn’t the final solution, but it gave us something steady to work with.
Using a bunch of liquid nails, he sealed those two pieces on the pipe, then wrapped black plastic around the whole four foot length of pipe. THEN, he duct-taped around all of that, and wrapped it again with plastic. He duct-taped that on, and then smeared silicon around the whole four foot sections again.
And.. it seemed to do the trick. But word to the wise.. this is *not* the way to spend a Sunday afternoon.