My garage is fairly modern, but the foundation of my house is from 1913. I have no idea when the current basement floor was cemented and the pipes under it were laid, but it was something I have been casually avoiding since we bought the place 5 years ago.
Last summer we had a few of our basement drains overflow after doing laundry or taking a shower. I snaked them myself and installed some backwater valves to keep the amount of overflow to a minimum. I treated the system with a few liquid plumber type products and it was fine for several months.
About a month ago the problem started to come back and we made due for a while, but after it backed up enough to flood the basement sink (next to the washer) I decided enough was enough and called up Auggie's drain cleaning. He came out and was like, 'uhh, you have no cleanouts' which answered a few questions I had been having--I had no idea how on earth he was gonna be able to clean out our pipes as I had tried everything!
So after some investigative smashing and digging, I found our drain pipe to the city sewer about 3' under the floor near the water main coming from the city (facing the street).
You can just make out the old-ass cleanout plug on the top of the pipe...I had a few other guys come in and they advised me that trying to open that would be trouble. It was basically at the edge of the foundation and if there was any problems at all it would turn into a massive PITA.
So we opened up the hole a bit more and cleared away the pipe and a cleanout was installed a few feet away from the edge of the foundation. Unfortunately there was a problem...the floor had previously buckled a bit and the jackhammering didn't help things...the new hole was about 8" from a few buckle points/huge cracks.
I made a tough decision but the jackhammer was let loose on cleaning up any buckles/big cracks in the floor.
At the same time we had a cleanout installed in the main stack...there is limestone foundation and wireframe lathe/cement wrapped up right next to the pipe. Some of it ha to be ripped out so I'm not sure quite how I'm going to fix this in the longterm.
Back came Auggie's and they cleaned out the main, the source of the problem. When the pipe was opened up under the floor, it literally flooded the trench that was dug around the pipe....ugh sooo gross! He found a ton of tree roots in the pipe and advised having him back in 12-18 months.
I carried out all of the cement chunks by hand and I struck a deal to have the cement re-poured for not much more than it would have cost me to do it myself
