Back fill

Today the excavation crew came back for back fill. The first thing they did was to dig out the sewer connection. So as it turns out, even though there’s a white and a black cleanout, I don’t actually have a separate storm connection and a sanitary connection. Instead I have a single sanitary connection. According to my plumber, the black cast iron pipe was used in the past as a breather. But the white PVC pipe somehow a cleanout going towards the house? This part confuses me a little bit.

Here’s a close up of the sewer connection. The good news is that I have a good PVC sewer connection that’s going all the way into the house. So I won’t need the plumber to dig under the footing and lay a new line into the house after all.

The bad news is after looking at the direction of the pipe, it seems that the sanitary connection is going towards this common cleanout right between 157 and 159 Chisholme. Which means that the sewer connection is probably a Y connection or a double connection.

As you can see the direction of the pipe seems to point right to the common cleanout.

And here’s the issue. I have no dedicate storm connection, which means my weeping tile will have to be connected to the sanitary connection. If city’s sanitary sewer overflows, there is the potential that my weeping tile will be clogged with city’s sewer sludge. I scheduled the plumber to come back tomorrow to hook up the weeping tiles. He said he will try to tie the weeping tile to the vertical stack so that at least there’s some vertical distance from the actual sewage. Fingers crosses that this will work well enough. Also since the sewer is a double connection, I am really hoping that I don’t have to get a new sewer connection, because a new sewer connection will cost me $7293! Here’s a link to City of Toronto’s page on new waster / sewer service connections.

Crew from Lee Rocca Forming Ltd also came back today to fix up the plates for the steel columns. They have unscrewed all the bolts on the plates and removed all the plates from the foundation wall. They have put down a 2″ non-shrinking grout under the steel plate and leveled all the plates. They’ve also fixed that really bent anchor bolt.

 

At the end of the day, most part of the house is back filled.

The foundation under the stair is back filled with dirt as well. There’s a hole left in front of the stair so that the plumber can work on the weeping tile connection. The excavation crew will come back on a different day to fill that hole.

And here’s a short video of the crew filling up the foundation for the stairs.

And finally, now that the trenches are back filled, I can finally get down to the basement and take some picture of the basement wall from the ground level.

Here’s a time-lapsed video of the day.