Three Days

I haven't blogged for a while again. But in part, it's because there's been so much happenning. Very exciting. One major event of recent days has been some works going on with our house. It all began with a symptom.

This was the interior basement wall, in the garage. Water seeped visibly through the stone, oozing through, like the tears of some miraculous madonna. Except there was a very rational explanation for it, something even more grotesque than act of god:

This is a bac a graisse... or sort of. It's supposed to be a clever run-off device, which traps grease and soap, so that the clean wastewater can flow away, leaving a gunky cake of goop for us to dispose of every few months. It's also supposed to be at least 200 liters, rather than the single-liter variety you see here. The baths and sinks (not the toilets) flow into this, and then the grey water is supposed to flow away into the bigger drain. But ours was so small, it's permanently clogged all the way down the pipe, and this little bit of genius pretty much assures that all our waste water gets dumped out right onto the foundation of our house. Brilliant. And so to fix it, we organized one of these:

...we also hired a guy who knew what he was doing. His name was Jean-Paul, and if you ever need this sort of thing done in this part of the world, I recommend him.

First and with amazingly delicate accuracy, he dug a trench alongside the entire north wall of the house. 6 feet deep.

In so doing he revealed interesting things. First of all, the soil was pretty dry, which was a good sign, except of course where we already knew there was a problem. Also, he revealed a layer of cracked pottery, very distinct, the length of the house. That's when the roof went up, and it seems the back garden was more than a foot lower then than it is now. And most importantly, the foundation stonework all the way down, even underground, was solidly done, and very pretty. Nice to know.

Then he got in there and painted the side of the house with tar, to water-seal it.

After which, he sealed the wall in plastic, as an extra safety, and also against insects and other sorts of mayhem.

Then he filled the trench back in. Kepler was a big help.

And that was a single day's work. Hard work, too. The next morning, Jean-Paul returned. He had prevented continuing damage from what was an ill-conceived system. Now he needed to repair the system.

First, he dug out the gunky pipe, oozing puddles of grease like a ruptured gut. Nice.

Then, it was new pipe all round. Turns out the outflow pipe from one of our bathtubs is actually made of lead! Gotta get that fixed, eh? But the new pipe looked nice and clean, and Jean-Paul's work, which I supervised perhaps more closely than he might have preferred (out of curiosity rather than mistrust), was very professional.

This is what a proper bac looks like:

Bigger than the shoe-box it replaced, that's for sure, and actually internally quite clever, the way it lets the water through while keeping the gunk around for later disposal. The next step was to install a perforated pipe all along the house, which then flows out to the same street-pipe as the wastewater. This is to catch run-off from the hill above the house:

And then, again, he filled it all back in. And again, as yesterday, Kepler was a big help.

Day three brought further excitement. The digger was fun for Kepler, but then this arrived:

Actually this is a good picture, because it shows everything that he did on the third day. First, he brought load after load of calcium gravel and packed it down with the roller to make a nice hard sealed floor. 15 tons of gravel. He left the big pipes along the house exposed, though. These he covered with coarse smooth stones, so that the water could reach the run-off-catcher, and so that the house outflow pipes could be accessed for future maintenance. Then, he brought in a further three tons of smaller pebbles and rolled those all out too.

And that was it. Three very hard days' work for him. I was very impressed, especially since it was the first real work we've had done on the house, and especially after hearing so many horror stories about bad and ignorant contractors. This guy knew what he was doing, and he was super-friendly as well. Recommended. The three days wore Kepler out too. All that helping.

And now, for the first time since moving in, we can luxuriate in showers, rinse our dishes full-blast. The water now flows away from, rather than onto, the house. Life is large, isn't it?