My experience was very similar minus the rooter service. I also had to dig a shallow hole next to the house where the drain left to see which direction the pipe went when leaving the house....walked that about 30 feet from the house then dug a trench shovel wide about 3 feet deep perpendicular to the pipe before it got to my fence where i thought the pipe would be...in my 6ft long trench i found it close to the center...dug the terracotta style drain pipe up and then cut flap out of the top of it with my bricksaw. Sent the 100 foot snake towards the street on the other side of my next door neighbors back yard...about 90 feet later, right at the street i finally ran into a huge blockage. After about 30 minutes of reeling in that junk over and over I was finally able to push thru it down into that sewer. God was definitely with me man...if i had dug my trench a few feet closer to the house (further from the fence) the 100ft tape would have never reached the blockage...or wouldnt have been long enough to clear it. I was very, very happy when that blockage was cleared and we could wash dishes, shower, etc again. We had just been married a few months and had a 2nd child on the way, been moved into our 1st home a couple weeks and were very broke.
That was late 2007. Not long after that 08 happened and my whole crew got laid off with me losing a foreman position laying brick that I had invested a decade of hard work into. Had a brand new baby, a wife and 2 kids to support and lost my job. Never been so scared before, since or ever. Construction work was almost non existent. Remodel work was the only thing going, and only the rich could afford that in a recession. I used every contact in my phone to drum up as much work as possible 6 days a week. On days nobody i knew had any work I drove to the closest lowes to my house at 545am before they opened and parked next to the contractor checkout with my truck and all my thousands of dollars worth of tools...and asked other people buying materials if they needed help. I worked plenty of days for $10 an hour. A fraction of what I was worth. But everyone else was hurting too...and i knew that $100 i could earn digging post holes, or spreading gravel, or painting, or hanging drywall...anything..was 1000x better than sitting at a home full of mouths to feed worrying myself sick. I prayed a lot and reiterated the promise I made God when I started my family...that I wouldnt ever turn down any work, if He would please just help me provide for my family. Please just give me what I needed to take care of them, the opportunity I needed to provide a decent life for the ones that were counting on me. God saw us through that recession man. We always had plenty to eat and were able to keep my son in Christian school and take care of Mama and the baby at home. I swallowed a whole bunch of foolish pride, and worked a bunch of nights and crappy jobs, but He was so good to us. A lot of people in construction lost everything in the 08 debacle. Good men with small businesses especially. I will forever be grateful for Him keeping us in that hardest of times.
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