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Last week was busy. With the interior painting almost complete Brian has been working on fixtures and finishes. Anything to keep busy while the sub-contractors do their thing. First up...house numbers!
The excavators finally received the part they were waiting for (actually, another plumbing company had one in stock that they didn't need) to start the sewer connection work. Being a one hundred year old neighborhood, however, you never know what you will find.
The first interesting thing they found was an existing sewer line connection, right where we needed it. A call was made to the city engineer to let them know. Then the excavator dug down from the sewer line exiting the house to the sidewalk and found (and broke) an unexpected six inch clay pipe. Another call, this time to the city's planning department who is responsible for all the infrastructure records. They came out within 20 minutes and had no explanation for the pipe. They asked if the neighbor's would run water or flush their toilets to see if it was a live line, expecting a deserted line. They found a live sewer line connected to our neighbor's house, up hill to the west.
A call to the city engineers was placed to decide what to do about it. Obviously we had to repair the line and the city engineers required a clean out for the line (the green pipe shown above). The excavator asked if we could connect to that line, silly excavator. No, the city engineers said they must install a separate sewer line connection, with clean out, about a foot east of the neighbor's existing sewer connection.
The above photo shows our sewer line and clean out in black, skewed to the east, and the neighbor's clean out in green, both fully set and connected to the sewer main. By the way, we had another inspector on site. Meet SPuR. Also known as Sparkle Princess Rainbow to the excavator's daughter. He's about 9 weeks old and absolutely adorable. No, he's not ours but was on site and made my day.
On his walk later that day, Scott took photos of the house from the lot below. It's looking pretty great!
Excavation continued in the front yard the next day for the retaining wall. It appears to be, and is, quite drastic. The retaining wall will be just inside the property line requiring the footings to also be inside the yard. Since the retaining wall will be just over five feet at the corner of the lot it requires a 3 foot, 8 inch wide, 1 foot deep footing inside the property line. They also removed the railroad ties on the east side of the house and leveled the soil to match the grade to the east.
