Before and After: Sewer

We are far from done with our house project, but I want to share where we started and where we are going. The best way to do that - a bit at a time!

Part 1: Sewer

The house was a foreclosure when we purchased it in 2013. We had an inspection done and the inspector pointed out that there had been carpenter ants and water damage. The big problem back then was the lack of a functional sewer pump.

We live in a rural area, and most people in rural areas are on a septic system. But because we live near a lake, our sewage gets pumped into small 1 1/4" lines back to our town's wastewater treatment facility. When we purchased our house, the pump was broken and no sewage was moving. The plumbers we hired were amazing, and they worked hard to systematically eliminate (pun intended) the causes of our sewer problems.

They ended up replacing our pump with one that had been intended for a strip mall (that's how much pressure it needs to provide to pump our sewage into town!) and jetting out our pipe down to where it met the town pipe. Talk about a dirty job!

Thankfully we haven't had any problems since they fixed it.

Our sewer system was the first big improvement project we did on our house, but it certainly wasn't the last.

Our noble plumbers had to dig up a lot of the yard to find where the sewer pipes led.

Part of our pipes!