I'll start from the beginning, because there are lots of little details I need to explain in order for you guys to fully understand the situation. (All names are substituted by fake ones for privacy reasons.)
In April 2016, I purchased my first house for $134,800 in Spokane, WA (primary residence) - yay, no more renting! A 3 BR/2BH (2 bedrooms upstairs with one full bathroom and one master bedroom downstairs with a .75 bathroom). My father was my real estate agent. The owners before me were house flippers who bought it for cheap ($40,000) in May 2015 and 11 months later had put enough work into it to make it a turnkey SFR. New stainless steel appliances, remodeled kitchen, remodeled bathrooms, new carpet/paint/vinyl windows/roof. Cosmetically solid and really nice; I wanted it the minute I saw it.
The first week after moving in, there was a knock on my door. Her name was Kay and she was the prior renter (for 10+ years apparently) who had lived there up until the house was bought by the flippers. After asking me if I was the current owner, the first sentence out of her mouth was - "I am so so so sorry you bought this house." I was confused. She said the house was in horrible shape the last few years she had been renting it and that the landlords were no help and didn't care to fix the issues anymore - mold on the downstairs walls, leaky roof, and constant sewer backups into the downstairs. I told her I had experienced none of these problems yet and invited her inside because she had yet to see what they had done to it. She was almost in tears when she was walking around. She loved the rehab, said it looked beautiful, but it was only a matter of time before the carpet downstairs would be ruined and I would be going thru hell with the sewer backups. (The downstairs was unfinished when she was living there and had no bathroom. Now it was finished with new carpet, a bathroom, and a sump pump.) She told me roughly every 2 months there was a mainline sewer backup and she would have to call a plumber to have it snaked and unclogged. Raw sewage would come out the laundry hookups downstairs when she did laundry and it would be all over the floor. GROSS! I told her thank you for the heads up and that I would keep an eye out for anything unusual.
About a month later (June 2016), I had Best Buy install a washer and dryer. (There were just hookups downstairs when I bought the house, no appliances.) We ran a test load and the water started coming up the downstairs shower. The sump pump had never turned on, so I assumed that was the problem. The flippers must not have installed it correctly or maybe the float inside it was not calibrated to the right spot or something. (I've only swung a hammer a handful of times in my life, so this is far from my forte.) I called the house flipper, Ron, and explained to him what was going on and he said he would have his plumbing guy come out in the morning to look at it. Morning comes and Jim (the plumbing guy) arrives and discovers that the problem is a huge paper towel wad clogged up in the pipe leading to the sump pump. Hence, the sump pump wasn't pumping because no water had gotten into the tank yet. Construction workers must have flushed the paper towels down the toilet during the remodel.
While Jim was still there, I brought up to him what Kay had told me, and if they were aware that there had been sewer issues with this house before. (On my title documents, all the boxes asking about knowledge of prior sewer/pipes/plumbing issues had been checked with a "no" by Ron.) Jim said they had fixed the problem by snaking the main line and then he showed me a picture on his phone of a huge root ball they found in the line. This thing was like 3 feet long! Seeing this made me feel better and kind of dismiss what Kay had told me earlier.
Well...on November 5th, 2016, my boyfriend was doing laundry downstairs and I was upstairs watching TV. (When we do a load of laundry, the washer will drain into the sump pump's tank, the tank will fill to a certain level, and then it will discharge all the water from that tank to the main line that leads outside to the city sewer.) All the sudden I hear the sump pump turn on, followed by a loud BOOM. Then I hear the upstairs toilet start gurgling and by the time I reached the bathroom, it was overflowing! The bath tub was also backing up, about a half an inch of gray water lined the bottom. I ran downstairs and the water from the upstairs toilet had seeped thru the wax seal and begun leaking into the downstairs. (Luckily, the furnace room is where it leaked down into and we have no carpet there, just cement slab.) My boyfriend turned the main water off and we immediately called a plumber.
The plumber came and told us there was a main line clog because the toilet AND the bathtub were backing up. That big BOOM was the sump pump trying to empty its tank into a wall of sludge. $370 later and the line is clear. The picture below (the furnace room in my downstairs) shows where he inserted the snake (125 feet deep) to remove the obstruction, which he says were tree roots preventing the flow of water to drain properly to the manhole located 200 feet from my property.
He also did a video inspection which is uploaded to Youtube (I can send you the link if you really want to watch it) that shows that the 4 inch clay/tile sewer pipe coming out of my house goes approximately 50 feet out and intersects at a "Y" into a 6 inch community sewer line that goes 150 more feet until it gets to the manhole in the street. I share the 6 inch line with the house directly to the west of me (#1) and with the house behind me to the northwest (#2). I drew a little picture so it's not too confusing.
In the video, it's obvious that the 4 inch line is in pretty bad shape - lots of grading issues and offsets with major healthy root growth. The clog itself was about 40 feet out in the 4 inch line. However, the 6 inch line doesn't look much better (you can see about 50 feet of it in the video). Tons of tree roots as well.
The plumber (and a handful of others I've spoken to) recommends replacing the 4 inch line because that's where the clog originated and because he can guarantee another backup happening in the future. I've gotten 3 excavation bids so far from contractors to get this done. They've all come in around $4,000. (Below are two of them, I don't have a copy of the 3rd quite yet.)
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So here's where I'm stuck. Say I pay the $4,000 to replace my 4 inch line and some day in the future, the 6 inch line has a clog. And it backs up raw sewage in my house again. I would have just wasted $4,000 and the problem isn't even fixed! I talked to the neighbors next to me (renters who have rented 11+ years there, but are moving out at the beginning of 2017) and they told me that their landlord pays $150 to have a plumber snake their line every 3 months. And occasionally a backup occurs in between those routine snakes. Now I'm even more discouraged to replace my 4 inch line!
I honestly don't know what to do next. I don't think I have any grounds to go after the flipper here for non-disclosure of a pre-existing issue he knew about because he can just say that this comes with buying a house with old pipes and that tree roots are a natural cause. (Even tho Kay said she had told his crew every day all about how often she was having problems with the sewer backing up when they were there flipping it.) I don't want to replace that 4 inch pipe if it's going to be a waste of $4,000, but I also don't feel right selling the house to another unsuspecting buyer like I was. I mean, they could probably come back on me for non-disclosure at this point, right? Especially now that I'm aware of a problem and the fact that there's a video of that problem on Youtube for public eyes to see. (I like the Karma gods and I'm not trying to piss them off anytime soon...haa.)
The right move would be to dig up and replace that community 6 inch line. And since the 6 inch line is a shared line between 3 houses, the correct solution would be a 33% split of the cost of a replacement pipe. And that would still be an eye sore of a number considering it's 150+ feet of pipe. And since both the houses that I share the line with are renters, I would have to be on the same page with both the landlords. Who's to say they want to cough up that money? House #1's landlord has been snaking every 3 months for 11 years tho! $150 quarterly = $600 a year x 11 years = $6,600!!!
One of the other options I thought about before realizing what it would cost me is laying a brand new pipe to connect to the manhole directly in front of my house. There's a manhole literally 20 feet from my front door. Why the city didn't connect to that in 1952 when they made the sewer system instead of connecting it to the manhole 200 feet to the north is beyond me. But I've been told (by these excavators I'm receiving bids from) that there is no "plug" in that pipe in front of my house so they would actually have to create a brand new one and pull multiple permits and lay new asphalt because the "plug" would be in the middle of the street, which would cost upwards of $12-15,000. YIKES!
The purpose of this post is to maybe get some advice from investors/flippers/home buyers who have been on one of the sides of this situation before. If you were in my shoes what would your next step be? My eventual plan for this property is to satisfy the 1 year on my conventional loan and move to another house, making this one into a rental. I currently am an Airbnb host (thank goodness I was the one in the house when the backup occurred) netting about $1,100 profit a month from reservations. If Spokane County doesn't enforce limits on the number of days a house can be reserved or put extra taxes on Airbnb in the future (which is highly optimistic thinking), I will continue using the short term rental platform considering I can hit market rent by utilizing only half the days in a given month. Pretty sweet.
Anyways, if you guys have any input or ideas, I would love to hear them. I'm really bummed about this whole thing, this being my first house and all, but I know it's not the end of the world and there's gotta be a way to solve this creatively. Sorry this is such a long post, thank you for sticking it out until the end! Cheers! =]
