>Ah, another tale from the Well, There's Your Problem files. I know
>them well.

Yeah, there's nothing quite as gut-churningly fun as spending money to have a professional come out and tell you that the problem you've been dealing with for months/years was a simple fix that has turned into an expensive nightmare.

>This place is reasonably well-built, although it has other quirks just
>owing to its age. For instance, the wiring is a Manifestation of
>Chaos, simply because the house pre-dates the electrification of the
>town, and has since been wired in at least four separate
>stages, each added without decommissioning its predecessor. I do at
>least have circuit breakers, not fuses, in the basement, but the
>breakers correspond to objects in the house in ways that I'm sure made
>sense to someone, at some point. For instance, one of them
>controls three of the four outlets in the kitchen, an outlet in the
>living room, and the lights on the front porch.

Brings to mind an episode of Married With Children where the cast found a light switch under the kitchen counter whose purpose was unknown, leading to the typical "comedy of errors" plot only for it to be revealed (to the audience) in the final seconds of the episode that it controlled a light socket in the doghouse of all places.

>(Also, some of the exterior walls contain no insulation, simply
>because it hadn't been invented yet when they were built. This is
>sort of a problem in, you know... Maine. Although the place doesn't
>cool off nearly as fast during a wintertime power outage as you would
>expect knowing that!)

Not even the classic "handfuls of wadded vintage newspaper" that I'd come to assume was a hallmark of vintage New England home construction?

But I wanted to take a sec to give an update on events in the past week, which came to a somewhat frustrating confusion in the past 48 hours. After approving the estimate we received on Monday, the plumbers returned Wednesday to complete the work on the toilet. Upon removing the (now retired) throne and the flooring upon which it sat, we got our first surprise since last week: The damned fools who installed the whole mess just loosely assembled the pipework and left it at that. There was no glue, no hose clamps, not even a bit of duct tape was used. Second surprise: There is no vent tube from the drainage pipe to the outside, which goes with the unsealed pipes to explain the leaking and occasional whiffs of poo gas downstairs.

So once they'd removed the disgusting remnants of the half-assed work that had caused so many issues, they put off finishing the work until the following morning due to lack of parts. That left my folks without a functioning toilet upstairs, although apparently the pipework for the sink and shower were still good to go. Come the next morning the plumbers returned, pipework and new toilet in tow. It was the work of a couple hours to get the new pipes fitted, the new section of flooring cut and in place, and the new porcelain assembled. When it came time to pay, I got the only surprise limited to me, which was that the estimate I saw on Monday of just shy of $1200 was not for the whole floor but just the toilet area. To do the entire bathroom, including ripping out the shower to get to the flooring underneath it, would cost upwards of $10,000.

Where's Bob Vila when I need him?