Finally, The Hook-Up!

Mid-April-ish, strange paint markings appeared in the street and in the yard. Rumor has it a permit was pulled....

Now, in May, we are a month plus past the time to hook up to the sewer. We are in Phase III and the San Luis Obispo Tribune has already had an article about "those" people who have not yet hooked up to the sewer. Well, rainy weather, contractors dropping out, and who knows what else, delayed our getting started after paying our deposit in October 2016.

I ignored my cell buzzing as I was stuffing my face with lunch at La Palapa. Suddenly apparently, the lateral crew was at our house and digging a hole in the front yard to try to find the pipe coming out of the house. There is a kitchen on one side, two bathrooms and the washing machine on the other. 

Then there was the picture from the county website showed two septic tanks. Why two tanks? We don't know. One giant hole has uncovered a pipe and a concrete tank, but what is that other blob on the county's image? When I questioned the worker, the response was: "We are going to use a water probe to go deeper" to look for that second tank. (Must look up the term, "water probe.")

Then there was the ugly white plastic pipe with the cap which I artfully covered by a lava rock planter, empty of its Bonsai tree, dead 35 years ago. I now learn that this is the cap to the leach field. And below that that is the blob apparently.

The original concrete bin IS the septic tank. To think I sat on top of it all comfy in an adirondack chair, munching a turkey sandwich never imagining it would, after some processing and transformation, traverse piping to wind up a few feet below where I sat. I know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but the gooey part in the middle....ugh.

Now the question was to find the pipe coming from the north side of the house that handles the two bathrooms and the washing machine. The kitchen pipe is elsewhere.

There was a joint where the two pipes came together. But the angle of the main pipe was wrong. It wasn't going to work! The entire pipe had to be removed and replaced! Well, that went rather quickly. Below is the end result.

Then the new, white pipe went under the fence and out to the stubbed pipe that comes from the street.

It was hard to get a decent shot without falling into the hole.

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Tonight, after dinner, it was time to shower, then flush and forget.

The inspector is supposed to come tomorrow. Fingers crossed.