adventures in home ownership

i haven't had a chance to blog this week yet. it wasn't my choice though. not really. i wanted to post earlier this week. we had a birthday party for bubba that i was going to write about and everything! then we had to vacate our home.

we had been noticing a noxious smell in our house. sewer gases. (fyi, we live in an old farmhouse with our own septic system.) so we moved in with my parents, thinking we'd only have to stay a night or two and then we have the problem solved and could go home. it turned out we stayed from sunday night to thursday! we checked the roof vents for the sewer gases and found they had iced over. not too uncommon with the kind of weather we've had lately (although this is the first time we've had this trouble since we moved in 5 years ago). with much frustration and a little help from T's coworkers--it's nice that he's got connections to a bucket truck or we'd never (safely) reach the vent that's up on the high roof!--we got them both cleared and then T and my dad put together some copper piping to hang down into the vent pipes. this will keep them from completely freezing over and should allow the gases to escape like they should.

you would think that would have solved the problem. right? well, it didn't.

so T got a guy who has a sniffer machine-thingy to come over and make sure it wasn't our LP leaking. he stepped in the house and, according to T, the machine didn't go off and the guy immediately said "that's methane" (i.e. sewer gases!) aaaaarggh!!!

so where was it coming from, now that both of the vents have been and still are clear?

T took him down to our basement and they looked around again. i think it was good having another set of eyes to evaluate the situation. because he found it! our big old cast iron sewer pipe in the basement that goes out the wall to the septic had a huge crack in it!

our cracked pipe

so that's where the smell was coming from! at least, after the vents had been cleared. T used some sort of plumbing goop or something to plug the crack and then wrapped the pipe good with duct tape. it should hold until we can get it replaced this summer.

thoroughly taped! and no more noxious gases! woohoo!

finally! so what caused this huge pipe to crack? T's theory: too much pressure from having the two roof vents plugged at the same time. so one problem literally led to the other. it only took T about 2 1/2 hours of taping to get this covered. (that includes time taken every 10-15 minutes to go upstairs for a few minutes of some fresh air). poor guy. i sure do appreciate all the work he put into getting our air cleared so we can be home again!

we moved back home last night and slept in our own beds. well, most of us did most of the night. cj spent a little time in our bed. i think he was having trouble adjusting to all the craziness this week 'cuz he didn't sleep well at grandma and grandpa's either.

so that's our latest adventure in home ownership. i hope and pray that we don't have any other household issues this winter. and maybe tomorrow i'll have time to post about the party we had!