"emergency"

So you thought by now you would be seeing the completed pictures from my hallway project, right? Unfortunately, wrong. I have made a fair amount of progress, and even have the next post on it 2/3rds finished... but then this suddenly had to happen:

 Let me back up and tell you how we got there. Grab a snack, it's a long one.Tuesday afternoon, just before I was going to leave work, I got a call from David saying the tenants informed him they have no water in the house. My first thought was, "well did they pay the bill?" Then I remembered that we pay for the water, and that we had in fact (like always) paid the bill on time. Next, I just assumed it was construction in the area and was not too worried, or at least would not worry until David got home and checked out our apartment, the valves, and spoke with the neighbors to see if they had water. Well about an hour later, after I get home, having already started checking with my parents to see what the issue could be, I find out that the valves are open, we have no water upstairs as well, and the neighbor's water is fine. Now it is time to worry. We call our handyman, and proceed to check around the house for leaks, try and find the valve outside, try our plumber, walk the yard looking for soggy spots- and no luck. Finally we decide to try the city again, to see if they will at least come out and take a look before we call a plumber, although we assumed they would want us to get a plumber out first. Luckily the city was incredibly responsive, and had a crew at our house in about 20 minutes, no need to waste time getting a plumber in. Meanwhile, David leaves to work the wild game, leaving me to solve the problem.

They crew went straight downstairs, heard the "roaring" meter, and immediately said we had a broken line outside. I immediately saw "$10,000" flash through my mind. I followed them back out to the truck, where one gentleman began to give me all the information to get the problem fixed and the other began to wander around taking pressure measurements. After a few minutes of talking, I finally ventured to ask, "Can you give me a rough estimate of what this will cost?" The answer: $3000. I was immediately relieved (obviously still not happy), and now I felt I could actually listen to the rest of the information the city worker was giving me. 

To summarize the info, since they were the emergency, night crew. The investigator and his crew would have to come out tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. He would file some sort of report that would be sent out to all the city-approved underground plumbers and they would send the city bids so we could get the lowest price. I informed the emergency worker that we were looking to pay cash and get it done quickly, and he said then our best bet then would be to call the plumbers ourselves once the report happens and let them know we want to pay cash because going through the city, he informed me, could take a few days. Since we had literally no water coming into our house, he informed me this would be considered an emergency, and the investigator would see this on his desk first thing (7:00am) Wednesday morning. At this point I was a little uncertain whether, even if I called the plumber myself, I still had to wait for the report to be sent to the plumbers, so they had seen it and knew what the problem was. But I figured that would be resolved quickly in the morning. Now I set about to make sure the tenants are comfortable, by bringing over a 5-gallon jug of water.

So Wednesday morning I am hoping to get a call by about 8:00am with the news that they are sending the investigatory crew over. I go into work, and it is actually busy, and don't notice til about 9- at which point I decide to call the number they gave me. I don't get the investigator, but his secretary, who informs me he is not in yet, and will call to set up an appiontment. So I go back to waiting. By 11, no one has called me, so I call back and get a different assistant, who informs me he makes his own appointment, so I should try his cell. I call his cell and he is out on a highway, dealing with a main-line break, but says a crew has already been out to my house, and that I should call the office back. So I call the office back and ask to speak to the first assistant, who suddenly remembers that a crew has been out to our house already this morning, and that, since we have no water, this is an "emergency" and our report has already been sent out to the plumbers for bids. She also told me now I have a caseworker who will be getting the bids and I should call him to see if any have come in yet, as it should not take too long (Yay! I think, now I don't have to call around to the 15 plumbers on the list and get quotes myself, the city is acting quickly for us!). So now I call the caseworker, and get his voicemail. No big deal, I thought, it's lunchtime. I will try back in an hour.

The lunch hour comes and goes, I don't hear from him, and I call him back twice over the next 1.5 hours and continue to get his voicemail. It is almost 2:00 now, and I am getting fairly annoyed. I call back to the main office, and inform the assistant I have not heard from my caseworker and wonder if she knows if any bids have come in. She does not know, and will call herself and try and find the caseworker. She discovers he was not actually in that day and she is going to call his boss and find out if we have any bids. I am getting really angry now, I don't know if we have bids coming in, and since my caseworker has actually not been in, I don't even know if the report has been sent out, and I still don't know if the plumbers have to see the report from the city before I can call them and get a quote. The assistant calls me back- and does not answer my question about the bids coming in or the report going out, but instead informs me that when I get home from work a crew will come out and hook our house up to our neighbors water. 

Quite angry now, I decide to just start calling the plumbers myself and hope they can answer my questions. I call 3 before I get an answer, and he, unfortunately only does commercial properties (so why is he no my list, I think, could they not have 2 lists, or at least an asterisk that indicates this?) and he had not seen my report, but answered a lot of my other questions. The next one, residential, I talk to has also not seen my report, but will send someone out and get us a bid tonight. I get about halfway down the list and get to a company that, upon hearing my address says, "oh, we already sent a bid into the city for your house." Floored, and a little confused, as this company is the only one who has acknowledged getting our report I happily listen to their detailed quote, $2850, and find out they will be available to start tomorrow (Thursday). I get the rest of the way through the list, and while not every answered, and no one else had received the report, I got 2 other companies who would get us a quote by the night. 

I get home now, and relay all this information to David, and before we can even process some of this, the city shows up, unprompted, to hook up our water to our neighbors- they must be making up for being fairly incompetent around the office. Our neighbors happily agreed to this, and even got a fairly good deal: they got a free repair on their outdoor faucet, as well as free water as long as our house was hooked up as the city turned off their meter. So now, at least we have running water, and don't have to feel too guilty about our tenants going without. By this time it is 5:30 and we have received 3 quotes for our yard- $2850, $2900, and $3400- and the other two that had come in could not start for a few days (some of this was due to confusion about what type of permit they could pull. I assume they did not know, like the first company did, that this was an "emergency"- since they had not seen the report- and they could pull an emergency permit and get started the next day. They must have been working under the assumption that they would have to pull a standard permit which would take 24 hours to receive). 

Since all three were in the same ballpark, and only one could start tomorrow (Thursday), and all were city-approved, licensed plumbers, we figured we should go with the cheapest, and fastest and just pull the plug. We call the first company back, and after getting a few more questions answered, we get them booked to start Thursday morning.

Thursday morning rolls around, and we both head off to work, so unfortunately we don't get to see the whole process, but when I came back over lunch to pay them the first half of the cost- I get to see them start in, digging in the street. This surprised me, as I thought for sure they would tear apart the yard first. But I assumed they knew what they were doing, and after snapping a few pics, I happily went back to work, expecting to see a gaping hole in our property when I get back from work.

4:30pm rolls around, and I head home, rushing back hoping to catch them before they leave or at the least before they have filled the hole in! To my surprise I get home and find this:

The only holes they dug were in the street, and another small one in the soil between the curb and the sidewalk. I suppose this is a good thing, but I was a little disappointed I did not get to see my yard all dug up. The workers were gone for the day, so we call our contact back at the company and find out that they have hooked up the water and are done, besides waiting on the city to come out and do their inspection- which should happen before lunch tomorrow. Now we just had to call the city and get them to remove the hose between our house and our neighbors, and we are practically done with this!

Fast-forward to lunchtime today, when I went back to the house to give them their final payment. They were done with city inspection and had filled the holes in, leaving us with this:

So $2850 dollars and about 68 hours later, we have new 3/4-inch copper pipe from the "city box in the street to our stop on the curb," better water-pressure in our upstairs apartment (bonus!), and most importantly running water. Besides the run-around with the city, the whole project went quite smoothly and we, and more importantly our tenants, only had to go without running water for about 26 hours.

And in case anyone is curious- we have offered to take off from our tenants' rent for the days they did not have water/ this project was underway.