If you don't believe me I'll tell you the story sometime about a pissed off tenant who flushed a bag of "Quickcrete" cement down the toilet and the $4,000 sewer line repair that caused... 

And Im glad I did b/c after the cement board went in there was a leak the next day.

The house is made of pure cement and mostly needs cosmetic improvements, appliances and landscaping.

I think we got a quote to build a cement encasing around our line for like $10k. 

Here and there you may find plumbers that will fill a hole with cement but they typically don't do finishing work.This is why I suggest that if you have a tiled bathtub/shower always have extra matching tiles and grout on hand in case they have to do plumbing work and don't have access on the opposite side of the wall. 

We installed our 25 years ago but it was glued down on the basement cement floor.

This helps cement my thinking around balancing relationship with cost -- you’re absolutely right about percentage points not making a big difference for my initial budget and that I will want to build a relationship with people and not a company.

And yep, they dropped it on the house, smashing the corner of the roof and cracking the cement walk/drive.  

We have a garage where a coach house used to stand and the garage has a cement block chimney under the floor, so we know something used to be there.Based on the current ordinance, it looks like we can't even turn it back into one that used to be there, so our options are to build without telling the city or sit around waiting for the city to finally re-allow coach houses.

power wash itwe have a lot of trees & every year we need to power wash the black residue the trees deposit on the siding & cement patio.