Follow the Pipe

Eish, this is when I get soooo upset. When we bought the house just over a year ago, it came with plans of alterations done by the previous owner which are okay, but when you find out that plans were not followed which now cost you money, now that makes me very upset.

The plans required a new sewer line to be build to accommodate, what it calls to be a store room to be built over an existing sewerage line, unknown to us, the new sewer line was never built and the storage room become an office over an existing sewer line that I am sure was never even reinforced. Was there never an inspection done by the municipality? No wonder, since we moved in, we have had endless problems with the sewerage on this end of the building. 

This sewer line was constantly getting blocked, and when I got plumbers out yesterday for the umpteen time to unblock, they failed and said that the line must have collapsed. This morning I got the quotation and it is R12,000 to repair. Wow, at this moment in time I simply can not afford it but it needs to be fixed. So I went to price the materials needed and then hired some labourers to follow the sewer line from the kitchen. The cost of the materials needed is only R1,200. What were the plumbers smoking, a R10,000 labour charge for a 2 day job. 

We followed the pipe down until we discovered that it turned under the new section. It was then that I realised that this was the existing sewer line and the required new line was never built. Grhhh!