Water / sewer service day 2

My new water and sewer connection is being installed today by city contractor OJCR Construction Ltd. And since this being city contract work, everything is extravagant. Here for the first time, my construction project not only shutdown down half of the street for most of the day, it also closed the pedestrian sidewalk. Look at his, the yield sign, the construction sign, the pylons, all are here just for me.

Can’t image the shear amount of equipment that’s here on site. We have a dump trunk to haul the excavated concrete and soil away, a backhoe loader for excavation, and a truck for the rest of the equipment. And a crew of 4 with another supervisor that comes and goes through the day and also other drivers that comes drop off equipment or drives the dump truck. This is one massive operation.

Here very quickly the backhoe loader ripped all the concrete off and start to dig the trench for the sewer connection.

The trench is braced using plywood and their special brace. You can see another brace lying on the ground to the right. The new sewer connection is now a massive 6″ connection. You can see those green SDR pipes on the bottom right.

By the afternoon, they have completed the sewer connection and now is working on the water service line. Here they dig another trench for the water service line because my water service line is not located where the sewer connection is.

By 5pm both the sewer connection and new water service line is in place, both trenches are back filled and the concrete truck is here to fill the concrete. The thing is that they dug up a lot of soil and they trucked all that away. Then they basically filled that trench with concrete! Now if I want to dig there for something else, it will be a pain in the ass since that pit is very deep and now filled with concrete.

Here’s a video of them digging up these trenches.

And by 5:30pm they are done. This truck just came to pick up these braces for the trench.

And this is what I have after the new sewer connection is completed.

Here’s the new water service connection valve.

Tomorrow, they are coming to patch up the street and sidewalk with asphalt. And they are basically done.

One would imagine that now my plumbing outside of the house is done. Well no. We encountered more problems. Someone must have done some repair to the old clay pipe. And when they did that, they did not replace everything with PVC pipes. When we hooked up our new PVC sewer connection to the existing PVC pipes, we thought everything from this point on all the way to the city’s sewer is PVC. But what actually is there is that the entire house is on clay pipes, only a small portion right around the clean out is replaced with PVC pipes. So after the clean out, it turned back into clay pipes again and it was clay pipe that is connected to the original city’s PVC sewer connection. Of course you can’t connect the clay pipe to the new sewer connection. So now I have to get my plumber back, dig up the area again, and replace everything from the current clean out all the way to the city’s sewer connection with proper PVC pipes. So here another $2,500 is gone just because of this old house.