As if mourning the loss of our favorite tree weren't enough, last week we faced our biggest decision as homeowners yet: How to deal with the broken waterline running from the city line to our house. The fine folks from the Columbus Division of Water said that our options were pretty much to either repair the damage -- which is an option if the area in need of repair is less than four feet -- or just replace the entire line. Our house is at least 90 years old, which means we have old galvanized pipes delivering water to the house. I say "at least," because there was apparently a fire at the records house in 1920, and any property that was build before that is simply listed as having been built in 1920. I understand that there are ways of tracking down the actual year built, but that's a project for another time.
The information we gathered over the next week was widely varied and left us even more confused than we were at the start of the process. The first proposal suggested replacing the galvanized piping with plastic piping, or possibly repairing it for about a third of the cost. Both options seemed reasonable, so we thought we'd get a few more proposals in just to see if we could get a slightly better deal. Instead, we got three proposals all recommending replacing our old piping with copper at a vastly higher cost. These estimates all came in about 40% higher than the original estimate using plastic. At this point, I pretty much just started asking everybody their opinion on copper versus plastic. The copper people were saying that plastic will crack in the cold and will last 15 years at best, and the plastic people were saying that copper is overpriced and unnecessary. The one thing everyone agreed on was that fixing the problem rather than redoing the whole line was an extremely temporary fix at best. After much hand wringing, and a good bit of input from January's dad and uncle, we decided to go with the original proposal of replacing the galvanized piping with plastic pipe. We scheduled the work for this past Friday and hoped for the best.
Mike and Matt showed up bright and early Friday morning with Bobcat in tow and got down to business. First up was ripping a giant hole in the front yard to find the pipe close to the house. Mike was awesome in explaining what he was doing all along the way, and Matt went out of his way to show us exactly what broke on the old piping and where the new pipe was going to go.
Things got a little hairy when they were connecting the new pipe to the city line. Apparently an old seal finally blew out in the process, and we had a little "water everywhere" situation. That provided for a little drama, but didn't really last too long; Mike and Matt were able to get it under control fairly quickly with a little help from the Department of Water. After replacing the seal, connecting the new pipe, and back filling the yard we were back in business!
What interested me the most in the whole process was the sheer amount of dirt that was left over. All that dirt was compacted into the ground, and when it was dumped back into the hole it left a giant mount of dirt about three feet tall. Getting this dirt to "settle" back into the ground completely was a two-day process, but was fairly easy to do -- just jam a broom or painting pole into the dirt as far as you can, run a garden hose down the hole, and turn on the water until it backs up and starts running out the hole. After repeating this process in various places around the dirt pile, it had already shrunk to about half its original size. One more session of this the next day and it was almost level with the rest of the yard again.
On a side note, the big obvious repairs in our front yard gave us our first opportunity to meet a random blog reader! Fellow Clintonvillain Erica -- @orchidarea on Twitter -- has been keeping up with our renovations and passed by our house one evening as she was on her way home and we were stepping out to run some errands. She was nice enough to say "Hi" and give us a chance to put a face to a name. I had assumed up to this point that I was writing pretty much exclusively for family (Hi Dad!) and friends (Hi Ben!), but it's good to know that we've got neighbors checking us out every now and then. Drop a comment sometime, it's nice to know who's on the other end of this thing!
If you're interested in seeing the entire collection of photographs from the day -- which gives a pretty good picture of the entire process -- I have them posted up on my Flickr account. I guess time will tell whether or not we made the right decision in going with plastic over copper, but we're feeling pretty good about it for the time being. Despite all the stress of getting estimates, weighing our options, and having no idea what the best choice was, once we made the decision things went about as well as can be expected. We still have dirt everywhere in our front yard and I see a lot of grass-seeding and yard work in our future, but it's good to know that we have our first major renovation as homeowners done and out of the way.