You want good news? let's talk about this fuckin' meme

But first let's talk about this

So eight weeks ago my (inch and a half) water main pinholed under my dining room. Because the dining room used to be a patio, and because it was raining, we assumed it was water in gutters or a french drain (I have fourteen gutters and six french drains). It wasn't until five days later that enough circumstances stacked (such as, enough water had accumulated that scrap wood was bumping against the joists in the current like driftwood at the wharf) that it became clear there was a biblical leak and that the water shutoff didn't shut off all the water.

Subsequent archaeology and OSINT determined that this water main had cut loose in 1986 and 2014. It's worth noting that the house has four crawl spaces, two of which are quite comfy, but the water main bursts about every ten years under the now-dining-room, which is utterly inaccessible. Fortunately this inaccessible area is surrounded on all sides by concrete footings which means any leak is shored up from affecting the rest of the house... at least until the flood travels 45 feet underground to find freedom in the shop. Nonetheless, we're not doing this shit again.

230 sqft of floor and subfloor have been destroyed. Roughly 100sqft of discarded, soaked carpet has been removed, along with assorted other detritus (a 1986 Coca Cola Classic can, for example), not to mention roughly 10 gallons of mixed nut shells and rat shit (and three mummified rats). The pipe had been clearly man-handled with channel locks, which is a good sign that it will cut loose again. The floor cannot easily be made accessible, besides which we're now talking about architectural modifications to support future failures. Instead I ran a fish tape down the pipe and located it in a dead-nuts straight line to the former-bar, future Bond-Villain-Fishtank room (yes there is a Bond Villain Fishtank room). From there it clearly elbows at 20 feet. From there it's 12 feet to a patch of dirt in a crawlspace I can access (albeit with an 18" ceiling), then it's under 25 feet of concrete (half of which is outside), then it's under a legit giant sequoia, then it's under stairs, then it's under driveway, and then 65 feet southwest and 15 feet down it hits the street shutoff. In other words, there's a 4' x 8' patch of dirt that probably contains a water pipe, is under shelter, is accessible, and can be re-routed through a mechanical chase into the mudroom closet (once the mudroom is built, and once it has a closet) such that the water shut-off is in a reasonable place, all plumbing from that point forth is accessible and never again will floors need to be destroyed to remedy broken plumbing.

I needed luck here. I needed the goodwill of the spirits. So I finished emptying my service pit. With no water, by the way, we've been without water since before Thanksgiving. But I emptied out my pit. It's got a drain! Six fuckin' feet under the garage and it's got a drain. And I reinterred Bandit. Yeah I found the jawbone and pelvis of a dog in there. I also scanned four rolls of photos. So I'm pretty sure this is Bandit.

Anyway. I had a little ceremony out by the Hoggson sign and a put Bandit out where he could spiritually bark at everyone walking by and keep the house safe. And I put some daffodils on top of him. And then I asked for all the luck the spirits of the house could give me and went digging.

With a mattock. Prone. On my chest. In the dirt. For five hours. Making a trench 18" deep (pipe should be between 6" and 12" according to code and best practices in 1970) by four feet wide. And failed to find the fucking pipe.

So now we're going to be for realsies and call in a locating service. They're going to run a snake down my pipe and radio waves are going to say exactly where it is. This will cost $400. They locate the pipe, exactly where I thought it was, and say it's between a foot and three feet down. They also determine that the plumber's former worker severed my landscape lights with a backhoe but that's a problem for another day - the plan now is to open up the subfloor, excavate where the elbow is and see where it's going. Because the obvious thing for it to do is head towards the street... but five of those gutters simply go at least six feet straight down and disappear off the earth. So the pipe might just go DOWN fifteen feet and then wing over. We have no idea. Apparently my electrical meter hookup is six feet underground because at some point in the '80s they raised the fucking STREET So it's entirely possible the pipe doesn't get within twelve feet of where I was digging.

So the subfloor is opened and the elbow is under a fucking abandoned patio. The good news is that at "1 to 3 feet down" with the grade two feet under the subfloor that means it's gotta be right at the surface, right? Bust the concrete and away we go?

No. Bust the concrete, dig two feet in any direction, dig two feet down, no fucking pipe.

At this point, my plumber, who is the best plumber I've ever met, is out of fucking ideas. He does not know what to do next. I say "well, at least this isn't the most fucked up house you've ever worked on, right?" To which he says, 'no actually this is far and away the most fucked up job I've ever worked on and granted I've only been doing this for fifteen years so there may be something more fucked up out there, I don't know, but if there is I sure don't want to work on it and i hope I retire before I find out."

Can you imagine how demoralizing that is? You've spent $90k on plumbing and you haven't been able to wash your hands for eight weeks. There's a pipe somewhere but it might be so buried you'll never find it. And your plumber is ready to throw up his hands. Your shoes? Permanently smell like dirt fungus. Your gloves are full of grit; you take them off (even after you've been pruning!) and your hands come out brown.

So you come up with a plan. The locators come back out. Don't know if I'm paying for them this time or not, but they were extremely fucking wrong - they now determine the pipe is two feet closer than they thought. So digging continues. And three feet down and two feet away (the locators are off by two feet) there's a TEE.

Not an elbow. A tee. Water comes in on the right, shoots off left to the inch and a half "lawn hydrant" (my new favorite phrase) used to fill the pool, shoots upward under the living room, under the house, out front, where it elbows in galvanized (big no-no), goes back under the house, pops up in the foyer and rejoins the rest of the house. The tee illustrates why the fucker was hard to find, it's complicated down there. Also, catching where it comes in means eliminating 20 feet of ABS to the tee, 30 feet of galvanized under concrete to the lawn hydrant, 30 feet of extremely ephemeral ABS under the dining room and 20 feet of already-rusting galvanized up front so my plumber? He cuts off that tee and we put a fish tape down it. Twelve feet in, it elbows. Right about where we were digging, really - He starts digging in my trench.

And fails to find the fucking pipe.

So I get mathy with it. The plumber's argument is that inch and a half ABS does not like to bend, so odds are good we're dealing with a straight line, at least to where we think. I get out my lasers and my tape measures and my fish pole and I do my calculations and I determine that where I dug my trench is two feet further than where we think it elbows. So I get back under my bathroom with my mattock and start digging a new trench.

And fail to find the fucking pipe.

So okay. Let's get real. I have all this as a WhatsApp conversation with myself - the most complete way to math it up. "5" from laser to slap. 35" from laser down to pipe. Laser is halfway up the joist, which is 7". Laser is now 17" lower than it was. 35" - 17" = 18" below laser... plus grade. Laser is 11" above ground. Therefore pipe is 7" down, plus however much it dives."

We're already 18" deep.

So okay. Let's confirm that the elbow is an elbow, and let's see if we can figure out which way the elbow turns. I have an endoscope (yes, we're now at lasers and endoscope). I tape it to my fish tape. And I discover that the elbow is not an elbow, it's a UNION and I can push two full feet beyond it.

In other words, both of my trenches should cross the fucking pipe... assuming they're deep enough. But how deep do they need to be? So I get out a level. And I brush away a lot of dirt on the known pipe. And I crawl down in a hole with my level and a tape measure and bending in some truly interesting ways I determine that over 4.85 inches of run I have 0.9 inches of drop which works out to a ten degree down angle but that doesn't matter this is algebra not trig and out where the union is? Assuming the pipe is straight? it's 34 inches down.

So I dig. With a mattock. On my face. And 36" down I hit hard clay. There are spots where I'm definitely digging through disturbed sand and spots where it's really clear nobody has been through that dirt since the glaciers so we'll assume the pipe is in the sand. So we triple-check our locations and there's no. possible. way. This trench WON'T intersect that fucking pipe.

But now we need more luck, and our FRP grates (subject to the most amusing product photos on Amazon have arrived. So we head to metal supermarkets and buy some angle iron. We head to Home Depot and buy two boxes of red heads. And we head to Harbor Freight and buy a drill press, and we spend a couple days turning this

To this

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Sidebar: With all the information I have on these people I decide to look up his mother, for completeness (she's mentioned in a letter as being unwell, I wanted to see where his parents' deaths fit into the overall narrative). She has almost no presence on the Internet, which is interesting for reasons we'll get into in a minute. Where she does show up is here, as "another Henry descendant." See those extremely politically-incorrect native american statues? I have photos of the 1986 yard renovation (which undoubtedly coincided with this damn water main cutting loose) and uhhhhhhhhhh

So you go "wait what the hell do they mean by "another Henry descendant" and you go "HOLY SHIT THAT HENRY" and you realize that while the guy who built this house was rich AF on his dad's side, he was thunderously wealthy on his mom's side and you're telling this to veen who points out that according to Wikipedia, this guy's great grandfather had a five car garage in Seattle in 1901, and you didn't think there were five cars in Seattle in 1901, and two days later the Seattle Times reports the first traffic count in Seattle as "on this day" and on that day in 1901, the first traffic count in Seattle counted ZERO CARS all day and you realize that this ghost, who built a five car garage, who had a grandfather with a five car garage prior to the advent of cars, had his widow sell his house to a jackass crab fisherman who filled in his service pit with garbage

and his dog

And if you wanted to be haunted? Well that's a damn fine start.

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So. Service pit. Restored. Dog. Buried. Let's buy a trowel with extra reach, let's get the picnic blanket the radio station gave us for fundraising, let's cross our fingers and start digging.

90 minutes later

I burst into fucking tears.

You'll notice it's at a hell of an angle. For a pipe that don't bend, it's pretty bendy. It was also at 22", not 36", which suggests that trigonometry is a pain in the ass when you're in a hole. But more than that I now have a REAL GOOD INDICATOR where that sucker's gonna be when it hits the footing and lo and behold

Now let's talk about this fucker.

'cuz here's the thing. The whole point of this fucking cartoon is to encourage you to keep trying or some shit. Not sure why these fuckers are wearing dress shirts and ties, probably because anyone needing a business meme is applying this to TPS reports or some shit. And what I will say? Is that once we tore up the floor, once we jackhammered the concrete, once we had locators out twice, once I spent NINE FUCKING HOURS ON MY FACE, that pipe was a scant four inches from where I had been digging. But you know what? We didn't know if it went left or down. We didn't know how down it went. We didn't know what the fuck was going on and no, you shouldn't keep pick-axing in your fucking dress shirt as if holes are somehow fun to dig, you should get out the math and laser beams

AND KNOW WHERE THE FUCKING PIPE IS

Because even with all the math and laser beams, my un-bending pipe was bent at a pretty jaunty angle and a good eighteen inches from where it should have been in X and a good fourteen inches from where it should have been in Y.

And now? Tomorrow? I will have water again. And it will be in a place where no more floors will need to be destroyed to deal with it.

As an added bonus, enough floor has been destroyed that it's just a little more added chaos to take my (REF) kitchen, my (-4.5") dining room and my (-8") garage and build the dining room subfloor at four and a half inches higher. This eliminates two tripping hazards, adds a third step to give me a truly sunken living room, and provides me a single 8" step into my garage. None of which would have been on the docket without eight weeks without water, due to the eruption of a geyser under my dining room.