Frankenhouse Strikes Again

Well, I may have to push my goal date for my new computer out a few months, as the house has decided to, once again, have troubles. I cannot recall how much I've written about our house, which we affectionately refer to as "Frankenhouse", before on this blog, but let's just say that it has caused us no end of trouble. Basically, a "do-it-yourself"er lived/owned the house before we did, and he did it himself, often without paying attention to the consequences of his actions. In short, he didn't know what he was doing, and did things wrong. Wrong enough to make an electrician take some of the stuff he found in our house "to show the other guys", after exclaiming in amazement after first seeing it. He assured me that it would probably end up in a museum.

Anyway, it's the pipes again. They backed up this morning and the plumber had to come and clean them out again. The last clean-out was in July. It's happening more often. He ran a camera down the pipe (which was kind of cool) and we saw the backups and the roots. At this point, I would love to just pull out every plant in our front and back yards and replace them with something that doesn't have roots. Like a rock garden.

So these roots are making nasty problems. We are going to have to get them taken care of for good. It'll cost around $6000 (that's my estimate after seeing the plumber's $3200 estimate that doesn't include tax). That's $6000 we simply do not have. So we're going to have to try to either refinance the house or get a home equity loan. I called our insurance company to see if they could help with preventative measures, but as I expected they couldn't. So we need to figure out how to pay for this, and everything else goes on hold. Well, unless I get donations to my computer fund. Those will get put in their own account and pile up without being affected by any other nonsense happening to us.

Such is life. You take one step forward, and end up taking two steps back.