That’s why he’s still a friend 
Mates rates usually end up a shoddy job as there is no profit in it for them. I only ask a friend for help like that if its an emergency situation where my quality of life is being effected. You may save 25 to 50% on the job if your lucky but it can test the friendship when stuff goes wrong.
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It’s one thing if it’s a chill out with beer and a purpose and a helping hand but in terms of a job forget about it.
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While we’re talking. Do you need your roof done???
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Lol appreciate the thought but my roof belongs to condo management.
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I guess we’ll continue to remain friends then! 
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It’s better that way 
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Couple weeks ago, I invite my best friend to come chop wood for him to blow off some steam since he clearly needed it.
I keep inviting him back knowing he likes to chop the big blocks, and since my fresh wood tower (holzhausen, google it) needs the bigger blocks anywhere but the top, I feel half guilty working through the wood cause the bigger chunks were flying by and he still didn’t bite.
Then he bites, comes back to chop wood a second time but now the big blocks are gone. Plenty of fat chunky branches to axe into firewood size mini logs, and a fine axe that will chop those fat branches in just one or two well placed swings, and the first thing he asks me when entering the woods, with a noticeable dissapointment in his voice, “Aren’t there any big chunks left?”
I mean I get that feeling of having that big block finally split under the 10th whack of the axe, but I invited him to come blow off steam by taking up my method of blowing off steam therefore to me I’m giving away my healthy exercise material, either split wood or go home and walk up the walls there you goddamn too loveable piece of lumberjack!
He’s not the lumberjack type though. He could be but he’s too caught up in busy city life.
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Meanwhile, on the toilet.
I first went in through the toilet, ended up getting nothing but tangled up equipment, so then I decided it was time to remove the whole fucking thing.
Turns out this thing hadn’t been removed in 40 years, and I had to take out 3 layers of flooring to get to the actual level the toilet was not just bolted but also glued to.
So I take out the toilet, spend a couple hours getting that clog removed, and while I am covered in god only knows what my wife comes behind me and asks me with the most sad and disinterested voice you could imagine, “can I help with anything?”
“Yeah, by leaving me the fuck alone like I asked you to do 4 hours ago.”
I get that she calls me an insensitive prick, but she’s a workaholic type with a career in mind and for probably the fifth time in 6 months she mentioned that she feels I’m the reason she can’t do work on herself or have spare time to do it in while she spends more time on her ass in her free time than I ever do cause I’m either busy on the house and surroundings or fixing shit the family broke.
/end rant.
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If it makes you feel any better I once had clogged drain lines outside and I plunged it with an 8’ plunger in the clean out but it only added pressure to the system and I ended up with a geyser of shit blowing out the blowhole and raining down on my head.
I don’t want to comment on your marriage but I got a little shiver because there are parallels in there about why my first one ended.
Best of luck.
Oh I hear ya.
Right now I’m contemplating divorce because of the parallels I’m finding in how she resembles my mother in ways and that’s giving me more than the creeps.
To put it lightly, my mother is in better health than my dad and that makes me feel good about him having someone to take care of him even though he wasn’t the greatest dad in my experience, but it also makes me feel for him and at the same time feel like he’s getting what he deserves, but if it ever comes to the point where I have to decide on pulling the plug on my mother, I’ll bring my electrical wire cutters so they can’t plug her back in.
Hell there are parallels here about why the relationship with the mother of my first child stranded. It’s different enough to stand a chance but at the same time, I’m at a point in life where life doesn’t make sense at all and death seems attractive enough to pursuit, and more attractive to pursuit than divorce to be honest.
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We repeat familiar comfortable patterns, even if they’re bad. Bad things can become comfortable.
There are similarities between my mother and Mrs Foreigner but enough difference that it doesn’t weird me out.
I hear ya. Same here but different of course.
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So it turns out after removing the toilet, I will most likely get to remove the paving bricks outside, excavate the entire tubing and replace the tubing to replace a toilet that’s not even supposed to stay in place. Now the most logical thing to do would be to not replace it in place but to place the new pipes where the future toilet is supposed to come, but the place the future toilet is supposed to come is now still a hallway which won’t change until I break out the walls and window of the kitchen, for which I need to first build a supporting column that rests on foundations that will be right next to/below where the future drain pipes for the future toilet and future kitchen need to run.
At least my wife is starting to grasp the tip of the iceberg of rage in me and why it’s now showing it’s ugly head.
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Ugh I hate opening things up because you just know it’s going to get worse.
“You do understand that your actions have forced me to move the whole house 3” to the left correct?”
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Not to forget, the place that I would need to excavate to remove the piping is filled with the stuff that should be picked up by communal trash services on one hand and brought to the trash facilities by us on the other hand, and the place I would need to excavate to place the future toilet’s piping is currently taken up by pretty much half of everything we own that we don’t have space for in the part of the house we live in, so before I could ever start working on the future piping I would have to move a ton of boxes and shit to, well, to wherever I don’t have the place for it because I don’t have another place for it.
And all of that would not have been a problem if building and construction could just go on according to my plan, but for that plan to work, wives need working ears and a willingness to listen, and even though I only have 1 wife to ask that from and even though I think it’s not too much to ask because she asks me to listen to her every day as well, god, if there ever exists one, chooses to point and laugh while raining down shit on me.
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And yes, opening things up is just going to make things worse. It’s much like surgery; if you have to get it done, it sucks and it’s probably not even going to make things better, but once you are at the point of really needing it, not having it is only going to make things fester under the surface until you need even more of it.
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Where is your frost line? How deep do you need to go? I had to go 5’ for my main sewer line.
If it makes you feel better my parallel to this story is I was turning a single family dwelling into a triplex and it needed to be done as fast as possible because we needed that cash flow to survive. Throw in massive financial pressure and it gets even uglier even faster.
My ex wife forgot to turn off the 2nd floor bathtub right in the middle of all this so you can imagine the shitstorm I had to deal with I’m sure.
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Did I mention the time (I believe it must have been 6 weeks ago by now) when my wife failed to close the upstairs toilet sink faucet, leaving me to tear out linoleum and underlaying carpet from the upstairs toilet? Fun times. Waking up middle of the night to clattering noise and my wife says in a sleepy voice, “It’s probably at the neighbor’s house” and turns around. Yep. The neighbor’s house. I think I did mention it to someone here but probably in a private message. It’s a stubborn faucet that doesn’t close easily, but if you know that you would think it would be a logical thing to check if it’s closed properly.
Frost line, I don’t know yet. Another fine thing about buying a house whereof no plans exist.
Should be about 2 feet according to my geographic region.
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