Have you hugged your plumbing today?

If your house smells good and clean - hug your plumbing. We are now very grateful for clean air. On Monday of this week, we noticed a very unpleasant smell as we both came home from work. After further investigation, we discovered it was coming from the basement. We went down to investigate and discovered standing "water" in the basement. I didn't think it was a huge problem, because it was raining SO hard and had been for a while that I thought the water just couldn't drain fast enough. However, as the evening wore on the smell got worse (as in MUCH worse) and we knew something was dreadfully wrong.

I emailed our dear maintenance staff and they took a look at it first thing the next morning. To make a long story short, the pipes were clogged and sewage was backing up in the basement - YUCK!! The 3 apartments in this building house 6 people, so you can imagine the smell. RotoRooter was here for several hours with no luck, so it fell the lot of our maintenance staff to dig it out.

This job was bad enough in itself, let alone the next catastrophe that occurred. The rented machine ended upside down at the bottom of our steps! Thankfully, no one was hurt (you can always replace machines; you can never replace people). So, the next series of pictures are over the course of the 3 hours it took for the tow truck, the bob cat, maintenance staff, several students, and many onlookers to right the machine again - all of this in the rain which turned to snow.

The view from our front porch.

making progress. . .

The slew of onlookers - our porch was full too. :-)

rain - turned to snow

finally!