Recent paintings by them, and some lady's finger printings. Lady's fingers are called okra here. I bought a very nice pack from the Asian mart the other day to stir fry with ikan bilis and my own chilli sauce. So I let them play with one of them, during their painting session. No prizes for guessing which set was drawn by which boy. :-)
Ok, now comes the sewage update.
Please do not continue reading if you don't like seeing gross matter.
This is the underground view of the house. Basically, pull up the carpets, remove the wood, and the pipes are below.
As Dh was crawling below, I took these pics for fun. Cos my HDB flat doesn't have this.
The guys were very professional. They first lined my carpet with a thick wide plastic sheet that was sticky on the underside, so it stays put on my carpet. Then they wheeled their equipment into my bathroom/ toilet.
They also wore shoe covers on their shoes, so that they need not take off their shoes and they go in and out of my house to their van to grab stuff, and maybe they also won't get their shoes dirty with the mess in the bathroom?
They removed the toilet bowl, and attached some part of the machine to the drainage pipe, then they turned the machine on, and there was a loud whirring suction noise. Ron, me and dh (who came home earlier) had to raise our voices to talk. We were outside, in the living room because there were 2 guys in the toilet already- too crowded. We did peek in to see how the machine works though, cos it looked very interesting.
While we were conversing, and Ron was complimenting me on being a good housekeeper (whether sarcastic or what, I'll never know, cos he's such a funny man), we suddenly heard the machine having louder than normal jarring sounds. It sounded like something was choking up the suction and causing a jam inside. Somewhat like a lawn mower cutting a piece of metal, or a vacuum cleaner sucking up a big piece of glass.
We went to take a look, and the plumber was trying to extricate something long and hard from the machine. Ugh, it was soooo smelly and sticky and yuckky, all the black goo covering it. I couldn't recognise what it was, until the guy said it was a root! A tree root!
After that, the same thing occured several more times, and more roots were taken out. There were so many that they asked me for a trash bag. The main guy who was handling all the yuck asked me for rags I didn't want anymore too, cos he had to wipe his arms. He said he can forget about dinner cos he didn't have any more appetite. I can understand that. The stink was filling up my entire house too. Poor guy. Ok, he's not that poor thing if you see how much he is paid. :-) They were in our house for maybe 30min and it cost US$430. Ron paid, but we still were shocked at how expensive it was.
The pic above right shows a root sticking out of the trash bag. I didn't dare to open the bag too wide cos I was afraid of getting the black sewage slime on my hands. So you can't see all the roots. But the guys said this amount of roots were the largest they ever seen, and can certainly break records.
Ron said it would have to be the 2 huge trees out in our front lawn that caused the wreckage. Their roots just kept growing till they grew into the sewage pipes. The house is very old and so are the trees. The trees are so beautiful and give us good shade, but they can do damage in this way too. Ron said maybe after we leave they'll tear the house down. The trees will remain to give shade to the new parking lot I guess.
I tested my washing machine right after that. And hooray! No leaking anymore! Expensive though it was, it sure was a job well done! Dh said the toilet flushed faster than he'd ever seen before. haha.
