It seems the best sunsets we see are while driving back home from the grocery store. This was Friday night. It’s the best I could get with my phone from the car.

On the home front, we are now ready to get an inspection of the plumbing that will be beneath the basement slab. The plumber came up last week with a helper to dig the shallow trenches necessary to get the pipes beneath the slab and with the correct slope. Shallow or not, the trench was hard to dig with hand tools. I watched for a while, and then a few days later, had a go at it myself for a smaller pipe to serve as a drain for condensate from the air conditioner and the backflush from the water softener we’ll install. The bottom of the basement excavation lies within the rock layer we hit a few feet beneath the surface. The rock is not particularly hard, but it’s exhausting to dig through it.

We’re having the plumber rough in lines for a bathroom in the basement, but we will almost certainly never finish it. That will be for the next owners. The rest of the lines are drains for the two upstairs bathrooms, the washing machine and the kitchen.

The lines are prepared for inspection by putting in a fairly tall stack at the main drain line, capping all the inlets or outlets, and then filling the lines with water. I brought up about 35 gallons in a tank I filled at our house and we strung a hose between the truck, parked in what will be the garage, and the pipe.

This is a shot I got holding my phone out as far as I could reach over the rear foundation wall, which has not yet been backfilled. It was kind of a stretch.

The sanitary lines are mostly buried. The pipes lying on the ground are the inch-and-a-half lines I’ll put in for the AC and water softener drains. The tank you can see is the same size we’re draining from, but we didn’t use much from it. It’s a lot easier to let a hose carry the water instead of hoisting it up in a five-gallon bucket.

The first filling drained out overnight from a joint in the lines. The plumber came back up the next day and repaired the leak. We refilled the lines and there were no apparent leaks. When I came back up the next day, however, the water had dropped about five feet in the tall stack. There was still no apparent leak. I refilled it, and it has held for two days. I have made the assumption that whatever happened (a tall deer with a long tongue drank it?), it seems to have corrected itself.

I called the inspection department Friday afternoon and arranged for an inspection sometime Monday. I will check the pipe Saturday and Sunday just to make sure, but I think it will be OK. Once we pass this inspection, the next step will be preparation and pouring the basement slab. That is the critical step after which framing can start.