I Found It!!

[desertcat]

The long lost sewer clean out!! DH will be SO pleased. We bought this place as part of an estate wrap up, so everyone who knew anything about where/how stuff was/worked was in no condition to tell us. Kind of a treasure hunt with no map.

DH has brought home all sorts of technological doohickies all summer, while I, armed with a shovel and helpful (?) drooling bloodhound, found it.

Note to self, though, dig up the new flower beds before ordering the stuff to put in them. I only have 40 more feet of grass to dig out before the plants arrive at the first of next week. What was I thinking?

 

[injunjoe]

Good job finding the clean out! Like finding black gold.

Did you manage to get that flower bed in order before your plants arrived?


Joe

 

[desertcat]

Actually, no. I still have about 16' of grass to dig out and we got a lot of rain yesterday. The plants are sitting in the kitchen sink right now hoping I'll go dig some holes for them this afternoon. Which if the north wind will die down some should happen. Then it's on to the next bed for the roses, which thankfully haven't shipped yet!

BTW, hubby is very pleased with what I unearthed.

 

[digitS']

You know, some people teach their dogs to dig holes for them. Who did I learn that from? It helps "control" what otherwise might be a problem digger by directing his activity for useful purposes: "Dig here!" "Yeah, deeper, deeper!"

My sewer clean-out will be a problem . . . The best I can understand, the washing machine was once in the basement. When they moved it upstairs, they just pulled the big plug out of the clean-out, put a reducer in, and ran a drain pipe down from the washer. One of the things a person can expect living a house built in 1901, I suppose. There's a good chance this place didn't even have an indoor toilet when it was built .

I also bought this place after the elderly lady was moved into a nursing home. She and her husband had moved here in 1939 and kept it for over 55 years. They had no children.

For some reason, I sneezed continuously for the first few months that I lived here. Another mystery was all the footprints below the windows. Finally, I discovered a cat looking in a window . . . I'm allergic to cats. I called the family friend that oversaw the sale and was told that, "yeah, Olive had all the neighborhood cats in every day for a snack."

The old fellow who had died next door a few years before we got here, left a far worse situation. The people that bought the house brought a bulldozer in and took 7 large trees out of his small back yard. Two of them were completely dead. Then they rebuilt the entire roof and replaced the rooms that were under all those trees - down to the foundation! His garage was also bulldozed.

I guess he'd started on the route to "compost" quite a few years before leaving home :/.

Steve

 

[desertcat]

Thank you Steve for making my place seem less disasterous! It was in good repair, but nobody had left a road map of where things were/are.

I used to have a dog that was very good at digging where instructed. Sure do miss him. Neither of the ones I have now believe in doing much digging...too much work and you might miss someone doing something REALLY exciting.

It was too muddy to do much grass eradication today, but I did get 2 peonies and 5 of the 6 butterfly bushes planted. One more to go and I start on the rose bed. Unless of course the rototiller magically attaches itself to the tractor tonight and then I'm going to work up next year's garden.

May I go take a nap now? I'm tired just thinking about it!