Thanks everyone. The birthday went like this:
Wife lets me sleep in since so she gets up with the kids. "Sleeping in" means I don't actually get out of bed until 8:30. Wife has pancakes, I eat these and things are going well. I walk downstairs into the basement looking for something and step into 2 inches of standing water. My day is going downhill rapidly. The house I have owned for 9 days has a blockage in the sewer line someplace between the section of downpipe that handles the kitchen and the laundry room and the section that picks up both the bathrooms. The drain for the washing machine is the lowest one in the house so everything is draining out of there and flooding three rooms in my new house. I spend the rest of the day drying everything, cleaning everything and then attempting to snake that drain from every which way I can. I finally get everything mostly dry and fans going to try and deswamp the carpet. The cleanout has been covered by cupboards some time in the past 56 years, so I have to use my recip saw to create a clearance to get to it, in doing so I hit a water line and the place begins to flood yet again. I finally get the water to the house off and get that water line replaced. Now I learn that the cleanout is way too tight to get open and I give up for the night.
Birthday cost:
14 hours of cleaning and fixing
6 separate trips to Home Depot
$130 in supplies
Birthday BBQ cancelled
Next day I have a plumber come out. He can't get the cleanout open either but uses a 75 foot snake to clear the drain from another access point and has the whole thing fixed in 45 minutes. My snake was only a 20 footer. Now I am treating my pipes with Root-X. Could have been worse, at least the bathrooms were draining and my basement was filled with grey water, not black.
Thanks for the happy wishes all
