Diary of a Triplex Part 4

We were moving into Spring of 2021 and the Eviction Moratorium was ending in April. Since I had to cut power to the house to repair bad wiring at the meters and the rotted wall that the fasteners penetrated, I informed Sam and Sherry that they would need to leave the apartment soon. They were none too happy.

On several occasions, over the past 6 months I let Sam and Sherry know that at some point I needed to terminate their month-to-month lease to start repairs and renovations. When the time came, I intended to deliver the news via a notice on the door but as I was attaching the eviction letter Sam opened the door and I handed it to him instead. As I walked away, Sam followed me down the sidewalk and insisted that I could repair the house with them living in it. I tried to explain to him that this was impossible but it went over like a ton of bricks. Sam yelled and went back in the apartment and slammed the door.

The week that they were moving out, I went into the other apartment to continue my demo work on the bathroom. The floor was rotten, so I had ripped it out and all that was left was the joists and the stub for the toilet flange. When I entered the bathroom, there was sewage everywhere and I mean EVERYWHERE. It was overflowing into the crawlspace and I had no idea what had happened.

I called my friend Nathan who owned a few rentals for advice and he gave me the number of a plumber that he had used in the past. I quickly called the plumber and told him the situation. The plumber told me that it was $3000 to come out and it goes up from there.

I ended the call knowing that it was impossible for us to start off with that kind of unexpected cost. We had no way to pay. All of our funding for this project was going to be from short term credit card loans since no bank would touch funding for the project because it was a Triplex and not a single family home. I had to solve this on my own.

I went to Home Depot and rented an auger for $150 dollars for the weekend to try and remove the clog myself. I called Nathan and asked him to help me run the machine. Together we snaked the auger inside the toilet flange from the demoed bathroom in the adjacent apartment and we hit clog after clog of flushed rags. RAGS!

Now I can't say for sure that Sam did this on purpose but it was feeling pretty personal. Sam heard the commotion of us running the machine and decided to enter the other apartment where we were working. Not the time to be confrontational ,Sam decided to deride me while my arms were elbow deep in well... shit.

I said to Sam, "Did you flush rags down the toilet?"

"Don't blame this on me, I don't have anything to do with this," Sam replied.

"Well if you didn't one of your guests did. You're the only ones living here and the plumbing has worked fine for the last 6 months."

Sam started yelling at me while arresting the movement of the auger. Nathan, couldn't handle the tension and decided to get involved.

Nathan charged across the bathroom and got within inches of Sam's face and shouted him down and out the room.

"It isn't a mystery where these rags came from! Here Kadin is trying to unplug the sewer so you can use your water again! If it were me I would just let the sewer stay clogged till you moved out!"

It looked like hands were about to be thrown. So I went to Nathan and said, "Thanks Nathan for everything you have done Man, but I need you to leave now."

Nathan listened to me and stormed out the house. I was on my own.

Savannah came over and helped me run the rotor rooter to its full extension but still the clog would not budge. So I called my Uncle Ron.

Ron is a commercial plumber and was able to steer me in the right direction. He told me to find the main sewer line under the house and discover where it exits the foundation. Once I knew where the sewer line exited from outside the house I needed to dig a hole to expose the sewer line, break it, and then fish the auger from there. The problem was tracing the sewer line required crawling in sewage under the house...

So before I did the unthinkable I thought I would take a chance digging outside the house where it looked like the main sewer line was headed and I started a trench about three feet deep and 10 feet long. I could not hit the sewer line anywhere. I called my Uncle again and he told me sometimes when the sewer line goes under ground sometimes it will take an unexpected turn and that it was unavoidable to dig it up.

I suited up in several layers and put coveralls on and got my two foot long "kiddy" shovel to unearth the sewer line. I entered the crawlspace and found the start of the pipe then followed it until it disappeared under ground and then started digging. Sewage was everywhere and the ground was saturated. As the pipe dove deeper and deeper the trench I dug to unearth it would fill up with sewage water and so the only way I knew which direction to keep digging was to stick my hand in the trench full of sewage and run my hand along the top of the pipe to feel where it was headed.

There was barely enough room to prop myself up on my forearms let alone use a shovel properly. It was miserable work and by the time I started to get close to the foundation wall, the trench was easily 2 feet deep. I was running out of space to throw the dirt that I was excavating, piles were starting to spill back into the trench. That's when something happened that couldn't have been scripted any better by a sitcom. Above me was the bathroom and I heard Sam enter and call out loud "I gotta take a shit!" Horrible noises emitted from the space just a foot above me separated by a inch and a half of subfloor, wood floor, and a thin layer of worn out vinyl tile. When Sam was done he flushed the toilet but there was no where for the black water to go, all the sewer was backed up through the house. Thus, the water sprayed through the old leaky wax ring between the toilet and the flange and all over me. I no longer had sewer just on the belly and arms from crawling in it, but I was now cocooned in a thin layer of sewage over the entirety of my being. The smell was nauseating. It was as if someone had locked me in a porta potty and tipped it over.

That was it. I was broken. I remained surprisingly resilient up to this point but now small sobs started to burst forth uncontrollably. I carried my cell phone on me so I called Savannah told her what happened and to get the shower ready for me...

... Now I knew where the pipe exited the house and I could dig with precision. By the time I hit the pipe, I was in a hole that was as deep as my hips. I took a hammer and hit the top of the cast iron pipe until it broke. When it did, a literal torrent of sewage poured out of the pipe and filled the hole almost faster than I could scramble out of it. I grabbed a bucket and slowly emptied the hole by throwing the sewage into the gutter on the street.

We took the auger and worked again a full 24 hours after the first attempt to remove the clog. I ran the auger in and out of the pipe towards the street while Savannah switched the machine on and off at my command. With my increasing skill taming the whipping auger as I logged more time, I unexpectedly had an audience. A voice called to me from above the hole. It was a guest of Sam and Sherry.

"Why are you kicking Sam and Sherry out? What kind of person are you?"

I responded "May I ask who you are?"

"I'm Sam's sister" she clapped back.

"I understand you are concerned about them but I let them know for 6 months that eventually they would have to leave so I can renovate the house," I explained.

"Why don't you do that with them living there?" she questioned.

"I've explained that to them, the power is getting shut off to the house because it needs to be rewired."

"I can't believe you are just kicking them out on the street." She judged.

"Look, it's obvious that you are close family with Sam and Sherry, correct?"

"We are." She responded.

"Well, I have family that I'm just as close with and I know that if I was in the same situation as Sam and Sherry they would take me in if necessary."

Sam overhearing the conversation looked at his sister with a hopeful smile.

"I don't have time to argue with you, I got to get back to work," she said. Without a further word to Sam she got in her car and took off.

It seemed as if she didn't want to offer the charity I had suggested.

I got back to work too. With patient persistence it finally happened. The clog moved and all the backed up sewage from the house flowed swiftly out of the house and into the city sewer and I sat on the edge of the hole thinking this must be the bottom of being a landlord.