I’m lucky enough to be able to own a home rather than rent, but of course that situation brings with it a lot of unpredictability. Case-in-point; before we bought this house, one of the conditions was that the seller replace the underground sewer drain leading from the house out into the street. This is a common issue with houses of this age – the old pipe deteriorates and collapses, leading to really fun things like sewage backing up into the basement. In any case, they agreed to do that before we took ownership of the house. Unfortunately the people they hired to do that job seem to have been a really slap-dash outfit. Their work wrecked part of our front walkway which they refused to fix for several weeks, and when they finally did they just use some cement sealing material which lasted for about a month. Annoying but we’ll get it figured out at some point. The bigger issue, which we found out this past weekend, was that when they tied the new PVC part of the main drain pipe into the existing cast-iron waste stack, they both mis-measured the angle slightly and used an incorrect connector, not to mention incorrectly bracing the cast-iron (it was basically resting on top of the PVC). End result – water dripping out of the gap between the two which had slowly worked its way open over the two years we’ve lived here.
My spouse and I are fine – there was no major damage because luckily I noticed in time, but we did have to shell out some $$$ to get it remediated properly. Kind of the high point of the whole ordeal is that we also got our ancient hot water heater replaced, so at least we’ll have nice hot water (rather than aggressively lukewarm water) once winter rolls around.
