Deep Sh-t

There were so many good possible titles for this post we almost couldn't choose one.

Today we got our septic tank pumped. And found out that it probably won't last us another year, so we should try to get hooked up to the sewer before the end of winter. Maybe it will last until next summer. It's $7,000 just to get permission to hook up to the sewer, and it will take roughly $5,000 to pay someone to dig the trench, lay the line, and hook it up. So now it's a race against time to raise/save the money. FUN!

It's not like it's one of those things you can put off, either. I really like being able to flush my toilet.

So, let's start at the beginning of the septic saga.

The guy shows up with his truck. He and my spouse go around back and talk about where the tank is. The fella, being larger than we are, immediately finds it because he walks over it and it bends. Well, that was easy. Apparently neither of us who actually own the property have been big enough to feel the bending before. Well, that saves us some time and money trying to locate the thing. The guy tells my spouse that we need to put a sheet of plywood over it or something to keep someone larger than we are (read: my brother) from accidentally falling in.

Then, they open it up. Horrors. We've tried to protect the innocent, considering what you're looking at.

Turns out that our tank is probably an old Sears model from the 1950s, iron, about 500-600 gallons. It's been retrofitted, probably by the previous owner. Super. The guy tells us that if he was inspecting our property, and saw this setup, he would have never given it a pass. Good to know. Three years later.

(You can tell that this whole episode doesn't bother me at all. $12,000 or suffer toilet trauma like never before doesn't bug me at all.)

Anyway, the guy pumps it.

Nice and "clean." At this point in time he thinks that we could probably last on the system a couple more years.

Then he tests our leach field. Turns out it doesn't really leach. At all. For $500 cash (it usually costs $800-$1,000) he'll come out and try to make it drain better. No guarantees that it will work, of course. At this point, there's really not much more to do but seal the thing up.

After he leaves, my spouse calls the utility district. They confirm the prices, and then say that we can actually do all the work ourselves to save us that $5,000. But, we'll have to sign a waiver that we'll be liable and pay for any problems in the line "downstream" of us ourselves. I don't know about you, but that sounds like an awful lot of liability to me. So I'm not so comfortable with that, either, even though it saves us money. We could dig the trench ourselves, and have a contractor could lay the line and do the attachment. We'll have to price that out and see how it goes.

We should even be able to decommission it ourselves. That will involve getting an inspector over here, who will watch us get it pumped, break the bottom out with an iron tamping bar, and then fill it with sand. Then I might dance on top of it and light my money on fire, you know, just for fun.

At any rate, we need to do something. This isn't a problem that will just go away or solve itself. But we won't worry about it right now. My brother moves in with us this weekend. We'll just have to let him know to go easy on the tp.