Our Own Recovery Act...

Mr. Experience, the ill-informed plumber, digging a bit pit out of the dirt under our house. It was a smelly and painful job, hurting my heart as well as my budget.

Our first plumber felt that cutting into the foundation of our house and replacing some of the pipe would solve our recurring issue. He proved not to be the expert he professed. And as a reminder of my blind acceptance I have a scar in my basement floor and a very big hole in my pocket book.

I have literally spent HOURS talking and learning the ways of the plumber. This screen shows a picture of the camera that is being shoved down the pipes from our kitchen out to the city's watermain. 3 hours of footage was recording. "The dirtiest movie you'll ever see" was the title the plumber wrote on the dvd that I get to keep

the basement has been torn up since June 31. Carpet pulled up from the floors. And a make-shift wall placed between our living space and the area where the muck flowed freely.

the kitchenette cupboard has been removed and will be replaced, to ward off any offending bacteria from the many sewage overflows that spilled up and out of the sink...

The week before school ended I had a rooter company come out because our disposal was backing up into the basement sinks. That was the beginning of a very long string of unpleasant plumbing expenses which have ended with our Home Owner's Insurance rescuing our family from sewage stained carpets and unsavory plumbers. This experience has been expensive, frustrating, discouraging and unnerving on so very many levels. Having your basement torn up (with the threat of having it torn up more in order to solve the problem) has left me with lots of pent up frustration.

But the recovery is nearing the end.

Not so unlike our Nation's current economic issues, our problems were manageable to begin with. Then as we left the situation in the hands of people we were supposed to trust as experts, it became much much much worse. While our home owner's insurance definitely feels like a bail out of sorts, the true relief to the problem came when we finally stopped clawing away at a quick kind of fix and asked many experts to give their advice. Then we took the least expensive, most basic and most "old fashioned" option. It took more time this way, and we had to baby our sewage system as we tested the value of the solution. But this has proven the be the way we were able to solve the plumbing problem. We didn't need to throw more money into possibilities. We needed to sit back, think about it, and make decisions based on reason and not panic or emotion.

Over the next week our basement will be restored. With a few upgrades of our own, we'll be back to having the kids sleep in their beds and be able to watch movies on the tv and soak laundry in the sink. Until then we are in "recovery mode". Learning lessons about our inablility to manage too much mess, and feeling grateful that our recovery-though slow and a little bit painful-has been better than it surely could have been. Here's to the hope of what happens at the end of recovery; peace and prosperity...and the confidence that what goes down the disposal stays down the disposal for good ;)