I’m celebrating this Independence Day by flushing the toilet.
This is no commentary on the state of our country. It’s elation that my house is, at long last, connected to the city’s sewer.
Longtime readers of this blog might remember that about four years ago the city sent me a letter that said they would lay sewer lines in my neighborhood and that I’d be required to connect at my cost.
When my house was built, it was outside the Indianapolis city limits. So every home in my subdivision got a well and a septic system. But then in 1970 the city annexed the whole county. Time passed. The septic systems in the annexed subdivisions grew old. Some of them failed. Many of them leached into the ground water. So the city decided to extend sewer everywhere. It’s been an enormous project that has had streets torn up all over my part of town for years now.
After I got over the initial cost shock, I realized that this would be dramatically less expensive than replacing my more-than-40-year-old septic system when it inevitably failed, which I figured would be sooner rather than later. I set aside the cash – and then it took two years for the city to lay the pipes in my neighborhood’s streets (photos here and here), and (unbelievably) another two years for the contractor I hired to get around to connecting me. They finished just the other day.
This was the scene in my front yard as the work commenced.
I was not prepared for the shock of seeing my lawn destroyed, but obviously you can’t lay sewer lines without doing a lot of digging. I was also not prepared for just how angry I would become when I discovered that their backhoe severed my well line. I was white-hot angry! Fortunately, they were able to repair the damage.
Although the sewer line connected to my plumbing through the front of my house, the septic tank was out back, and part of the job included pumping the tank dry and filling it with dirt. The Bobcat they used to move the dirt tore up my grass pretty bad.
After the line was laid and the city inspection had passed, they filled in the trench. And now I have a lot of landscaping to do. Yay.
I’m relieved, not only that the job is done but especially that I’ve written the final check to pay for all of this.
