[AE.Personal] The pipes, the pipes are calling...
So, the repair work I've mentioned is finished. It wound up being spread over last Friday, this Monday, and Tuesday. It took longer than we had expected, but was ultimately less damaging and disruptive to our house than we had feared.
We had been told that getting at the water and sewage lines would require breaking up part of our house's concrete front porch and had been braced to basically lose half of it, keeping it a technically usable but potentially dangerous eyesore. But they were able to get at them by neatly breaking off a short set of stairs at the side.
They were useful for people making deliveries, and we'll need to extend the railing if we don't replace them as it's a safety hazard to have the end open like one could simply and safely step off them, but it's not like there's a jagged edge and a dangerous tumble inches to the side of our front door.
The yard... it's not super sightly, but it's not something I'd call damage. It's not like we need to buy rolls of replacement turf to keep up with an HOA restriction. We want to phase out the grass lawn anyway. They dug up a tree I liked, whose roots had infiltrated our pipes, but that tree had previously been cut down twice and sprang back to life (which is why I liked it) so it was already on borrowed time. We have no plans to replace it.
The other damage is too our driveway, which has effectively gone from being partially paved to being mostly dirt. As a non-driver, I'm not fully conversant with the advantages of a paved driveway over a dirt one, but I think repaving it will be a necessity if only because of erosion.
To be clear, this is me relating what happened, not me complaining about the job they did. None of what they had to do to get at the pipes came as a surprise and they were also clear up front that repairing the damage was not their job or responsibility as plumbers. They filled in the holes they dug and removed the debris they made. As far as we've been able to tell they did a good job of replacing the plumbing, which will help prevent more ad hoc repairs down the line, as well as hopefully helping us avoid a recurrence of water-related basement problems.
So that's what's been going on here so far this week, coming off of a week of being sick. I hope to be doing some more substantive writing soon. Truly, as the ancient poet said,
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