(As opposed to cooked sewage?)

Some of the most wonderful lessons you learn in life come from owning a home. And by “wonderful” I mean “craptastic”. A week ago I went to get some laundry out of the basement and noticed a terrible smell, and noticed that, slowly but visibly, raw sewage was seeping out of the drain in my floor. I knew it was sewage because of the smell, but moreso because of the chunks that came with it. What chunks? Use your imagination.

So I tell Melissa to stop running all water and hope for it to die down and seep back into the drain. It does, so I chalk it up to the heavy rainfall and melting snow we recently had. Then Melissa empties the bathwater from two floors up, and all hell breaks loose: The sewage is actively running out of the drain and spreading toward the clothes, the walls, the doorway… I couldn’t do anything, and it hit the carpet on the other side of the wall and was wicked all throughout the carpet.

The plumbers who rooted (routed?) the sewer main told me that the problem was caused by tree root balls. Evidently, in older neighboorhoods, tree roots can be attracted to cracks in the pipes and actually grow into the sewer main (how this doesn’t compromise the pipes, I’ll never know). So that’s what happened. The best part was that house insurance didn’t cover it, because the cause of the damage was external to the home. So, out of pocket right after the holiday spending, three digits for the plumbers and four digits for the cleanup crew. Cleanup crew? Yes, raw sewage in the home is a biohazard that shouldn’t be cleaned up by mere homeowning mortals because sewage can cause Cholera and other wonderful diseases.

And by “wonderful” I mean “craptastic”.