ever wonder what a $5,000 hole looks like?

these last few weeks have really gotten away from us. over the next couple days, we’ll be posting a bunch of entries on what we’ve gotten done recently.

for now, here’s the precious story of why we have no front yard anymore.

you may recall that three weeks after we closed on the house, there was water in the basement and we were told we’d have to have two portions of the sewer line replaced. we finally gave in and called roto-rooter a couple weeks ago to have the front yard work done. here’s what they found:

over the course of three days, they replaced the broken clay pipe with new clay pipe and filled in the hole. of course, along the way they also cracked our water main…

but to their credit, they didn’t expect the water main to be laying right on top of the sewer main. the water department evidently hadn’t been out to mark where it was, and they should have noticed that before they started digging. but in any case, they had a guy out that afternoon who patched it up just fine (as far as we know), and the work still got done by the end of the week. they also installed a clean-out with no extra charge.

and it wasn’t long before the hole was filled in again…

and we got good news: we won’t need to tear up our basement after all. they found no problems in the sewer line when they camera’d at the end of this job.

our friends and family have had no trouble finding our house this month, that’s for sure.

ps — does anyone have advice for how to get a huge pile of dirt to compact quickly? we’ve been watering it and shifting the dirt around, and now it’s only 8-12″ high. but we’d like it flat, pleaseandthankyou.