House update
The house is coming along, though slowly.
The foundation is done, and they brought in a LOT of rock. The basement floors are being poured early next week and then the framers come in. The workers have been very slow and sporadic to show up these past few weeks, so we are now a couple weeks behind on the schedule.
Operation Sewer Hookup
The task of hooking up our house to the city sewer is well underway.
This is a big job. The sewer line starts in our back yard, about nine feet below the floor level of our house. It travels all the way across the back yard, and then out to the street. Obviously, the pipe has to slope downward the entire way (I believe they say sh*t doesn't flow uphill). So by the time it reaches the street, the pipe will be about 18 feet under ground.
The trench they're digging is quite deep. I would not want to be down in there. Would you?
Sewer Hookup
Septic tanks have a pretty negative stigma, don't you think? It's really not that bad, and a lot of really nice houses have them. If you build a big house somewhere kind of remote...say out on Skyline for example, it's the only option.
Our neighborhood does not have a sewer system, so everyone has a septic tank. However, the sewer line ends just in front of our house (our property is adjacent to a fairly new neighborhood). So we can just manage to hook into it.
We've had a little trouble with our septic tank, and since the sewer hookup is just in front of our house, the health department says we need to hook in there instead of fixing the existing septic tank. That is going to be a really big project, but something we need to do!
Any day now, we're going to get started doing that - workers are going to excavate or bore through our property and install about 200 feet worth of gravity fed sewer line from behind our house to the sewer line in front. Should be interesting!
We'd also like to hook into city water, but since the fees we'd have to pay for the privilege of getting a monthly water bill are so high, we're gonna stay with our well for the time being. We're still installing water pipes in tandem with this project, so a future hookup will have minimal labor expense. I really like being on a well, anyway.