I need help with my plumbing.
Details below the squiggly.
For those who don't know me,
before you consider helping me,
I suppose you want to know a little about me.
Here is my profile:
http://dailykos.com/...
UID: 90653
Joined: Jun 10, 2006
Diaries published: 222
Comments posted: 6091
This is the diary I wrote just after my first wife,
Pam,
died:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
By the way, I am feeling much better now. Better than I did when my wife was very ill, but still alive. Better than I did on the day she died, or the day after.
I am learning to use the phone to call people, so that I do not feel lonely.
And I am writing this to all of you, so I will not feel lonely. So, if you have read this far, please give me mojo, rec, and especially take a minute to write a little comment.
That quote points out what you,
my online Daily Kos friends,
have been doing for me,
for more than four years.
You've been giving me emotional support.
And I thank you.
I wrote a lot of diaries at my online grief support group,
The Grieving Room:
Dem in the heart of Texas 48
TrueBlueMajority 25
exmearden 19
bigjacbigjacbigjac 19
The number after each username
tells you how many diaries each of us
has written for the series.
The one just above me,
exmearden,
is now dead and gone.
Only two bloggers
have written more diaries for the series
than exme and I.
I'm simply trying to establish,
for those who don't know me,
that I've been here a while,
and that I've joined in,
a lot,
by writing diaries at my grief support group,
to give and receive emotional support.
This is a diary I wrote,
to bring together some comments,
very positive comments,
written by others,
about me.
Check it out:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
an elegant eulogy
beautifully spare and
deeply emotional.
That was a comment about an article I wrote,
about a neighbor who died.
I'm happily remarried,
so I'm not feeling so much
of that old widower's grief.
I live-blogged my wedding:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
We've said our vows, and I cried during my
repeating the vows,
as the pastor led me through them.
He let me read my vows at the end.
I cried again.
by bigjacbigjacbigjac on Tue Oct 25, 2011 at 08:39:54 PM CDT
My new marriage,
my new bride,
that's the reason
I'm living in a house
that needs so much work.
Here's the explanation:
My new bride,
Tonia,
is a very strong willed black woman,
and she grew up in a certain neighborhood,
in one house or another,
over the years,
always on a certain street,
the same street,
for most of her life.
In the months leading up to our wedding,
she had been living with me,
in my small apartment,
for a while,
but she asked me to move in with her,
in her brother's house,
back in her old neighborhood,
back on the same old street.
The house needs a lot of work,
but I agreed to move in,
anyway.
Home is where you feel safe,
and I feel safe,
safe from those terrible episodes of depression,
as long as I'm with Tonia.
We've made ourselves at home.
I wrote two diaries
about our efforts
to settle in:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
We recently moved into a room
in her brother's house,
a room with a 9' high ceiling.
We mounted the bookcases,
side by side,
way up against the ceiling.
Then we pushed our king sized bed
under the bookcases.
Here's the other diary:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
I have such a good time,
with doing laundry,
in cold water,
(since we have no water heater),
and hanging the clothes on the line,
(since we have no dryer),
and waiting till the rain stops,
so the laundry will get dry.
I truly enjoy all that.
I fixed the banister,
so we have something to hang on to
when climbing the stairs.
From that diary,
you get some idea
of how much work the house needs.
To eat an elephant,
eat one bite at a time.
To fix this house,
we need to do it
one project at a time.
Michael, Uncle Randall, Terrell, Isaac,
and Tonia and I
all live in this house,
and we've talked about what we should do first.
The first thing we want to do,
is to fix the plumbing.
The first plumbing project we need to do,
is to replace the sewer line,
from the house out to the street.
Here is a video,
made by someone else,
about the same thing we're dealing with:
http://www.youtube.com/...
Here is the Wiki entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Orangeburg was a low cost alternative to metal for sewer lines in particular. Lack of strength causes pipes made of Orangeburg to fail more frequently than pipes made with other materials. The useful life for an Orangeburg pipe is about 50 years under ideal conditions, but has been known to fail in as little as 10 years. It has been taken off the list of acceptable materials by most building codes.
Our house was built in 1950.
That's 62 years ago.
It's time to replace the cardboard sewer line.
A few weeks ago,
Michael,
my brother-in-law who is actually buying the house,
got out in the front yard,
and started digging,
with an ordinary shovel,
and dug a hole about two feet deep.
A day or two later,
I went out,
at the coolest part of the day,
which is just before sunrise,
and I dug into that dirt,
another two feet or so.
Tonia sat on a chair,
to keep me company.
Tonia weighs about 375,
and she has bad knees,
so she couldn't help directly.
(Tonia weighed a lot more,
years ago;
she's steadily losing weight.)
(She's very strong and healthy,
so don't be depressed about Tonia,
thinking she's a lost cause.)
Then,
my very athletic brothers-in-law,
Terrell and Isaac,
grabbed a better,
lighter shovel.
Terrell and Isaac dug and dug,
for two or three days.
The mud was sticking to the shovel,
and I saw Terrell,
one time,
swing the shovel up,
over his head,
to throw off the mud,
but the mud was stuck to his shovel,
as if it was stuck on with Krazy Glue.
They dug about six feet down,
and finally reached the sewer line.
The heroes of the sewer line replacement drama,
so far,
are my brothers-in-law,
Terrell and Isaac.
They worked the hardest,
by far.
Michael paid a plumber
$350
to install a clean out,
which,
in this case,
is some white plastic pipe,
extending a few feet out from the house,
a "T" connection,
a vertical pipe tall enough to reach ground level,
and a few more feet of plastic pipe,
heading towards the street.
But there's still about thirty feet or so
of Orangeburg cardboard sewer line
that needs to be replaced,
from the hole we dug,
out to the street.
A few days later,
the city inspector
told us we must put the dirt back in the hole,
so we did.
But we'll need to dig it out again,
to finish the job.
Here is a scene from the movie,
Cool Hand Luke,
one of my favorites.
Watch the scene,
to see how I feel about Terrell and Isaac and Michael and I,
digging up the front yard,
again.
http://www.youtube.com/...
The house needs a lot of other work,
but we want to replace the sewer line first.
Then,
we'll repair or replace
any other plumbing that needs work.
Plumbers charge about
$1,000 to dig up the front yard,
(that's why we tried to do it ourselves)
and,
as you can tell from the
$350 charged
for installing a few feet of pipe,
the actual replacing of the sewer line,
and cleaning it out,
and checking it with a camera,
and checking all the sewer lines in the house,
three bathrooms,
plus the kitchen sink,
and the washing machine drain,
checking all that may well cost another
$1,000.
I think I can do some of the simple pipe replacement,
in the crawl space,
myself,
replacing all the old cast iron sewer lines
with new plastic pipes.
Then,
after the plumbing is in order,
we can think about getting a water heater.
Then,
Michael says we should replace much of the electrical wiring,
and I want to replace all the electrical outlets and switches.
And so on.
But the sewer line is first.
Tonia and I use our garden hose
to rinse the sweat off ourselves,
in the back yard,
which, now, in the summertime,
is really quite pleasant.
But,
keep in mind,
we can't use the toilets.
I'm not sure what everyone else in the house does,
but Tonia and I shit in a trash can,
and dump the shit in the back yard.
So.
I have no paypal account,
and I'd rather not try to set one up.
If you want to send a check by snail mail,
send me a private message.
I'll give you our snail mail address,
in my reply.
I just realized,
that means I'll need to give our snail mail address
to each one who wants it,
separately.
I can copy and paste it,
once I write it the first time.
I thank you in advance,
any of you who send me a message,
and send us a check.
For those of you who do not,
(probably cannot),
thanks for reading.
Remember,
many of you have given me,
for years now,
truly warm and loving emotional support.
Tonia gives me that now,
but I still enjoy
any emotional support I can get,
from anyone,
such as what you might give me
in a thoughtful comment.
Don't underestimate the value of that.
Thanks again.