Day Seven in the Basement: Inspection

No, you didn't read the title wrong and I didn't skip a few days.  It has been seven days on the project but nothing has happened the past few.  Inspection was scheduled for Monday so we had nothing over the weekend and then the inspector didn't show Monday so we had another day off. 

Yesterday, the inspector arrived and things can proceed.  The huge bonus to this was that they could finally hook up our laundry sink and we can do laundry again.  I have to climb over the grand canyon that is our basement floor but after a week without laundry, it is worth it.  The timing and inability to do laundry for so long was certainly not in our schedule.  Nor was our daughter getting the stomach flu, thus increasing the amount of gross laundry we had to do.   

I've been unhappy with the basement progress so I figured I would get something done to make me feel better about things.  Well, here's another project that didn't work out as planned.  I have all of the new light switches for the main rooms and decided to install them.  I have two problems now.  The dining room switch will require some additional plaster patching and painting up to the switch.  I guess the old plate covered more of the "hole" than the new one.  I also now hate how the HVAC controls look on this wall.  I believe I can move the humidification controls to the basement but I am not sure what to do with the thermostat. 

The switches in the living room didn't fare so well either.  The box behind the left switches was installed at a slight angle and not at the same height as the existing box.  I am going to have to go back in and fix this or it is apt to drive me crazy.  This also means more patching and painting.  On the bright side, I love the new switches and they add a lot to the room.

Day Three in the Basement: Finishing the Piping and Installing the Pump

I figured that since I was spending so much money on this project that a panoramic view of the work was in order.  The plumbers finished the plumbing today and everything is awaiting inspection.  The inspectors won't arrive until Monday so we won't be able to have the final concrete done until then. 

All of the connections are made at the pump side of the basement and things laid out how I thought, though not exactly how they initially planned it.  This is a good thing because their initial plan would have called for some demolition within the actual living area and that wouldn't have been a good thing.  I think they did a good job laying this out.

As part of the work, we also invested in a high-water alarm.  This will tell us if the pump is not working and the basin is full so that we don't make the mistake of running the laundry or any other plumbing fixtures, causing additional problems.  We only have a pump for the overhead plumbing system and do not have a sump.  I don't believe that our issue has ever been groundwater.  It seems to have always been sewer water.  Even if you are just a casual visitor to the blog, you would know that we disconnected our downspouts and  installed rain barrels years ago, so we are not adding any of our own storm runoff to the home's wastewater system. 

I figured that I would add this diagram to explain to folks what everything is.  People commonly call this system an "overhead plumbing" system because it puts all of the waste water from the basement into a central area.  In this case, it is collected in a basin.  The basin has a pump that pumps the water up overhead in a pipe that connects the the gravity-fed wastewater system (the waste stack) from the plumbing upstairs.  It is this loop that keeps water from coming into the basement from the municipal sewer.  When there is a sewer backup, it can get into this pipe but only travel as high as the surge from outside.  The only way it could get in the house is if the water got higher than that loop.  In this case, all of Chicagoland would likely be under water and we'd have greater problems than my tiny finished basement.    

I've scheduled some additional repairs on my catch basin because of some flooding we had a few weeks ago caused by that.  The plumbers also have a few other minor odds and ends to fix up so they will be returning tomorrow.  I probably won't post again on the subject until after inspection though.

Over the past couple days, I've thought again and again, "why the hell are we going through this".  It has been messy, inconvenient and expensive.  I then look at the old photos of all of our stuff in the basement submerged in almost a foot of sewage and it all seems to make sense.