We've been tossing a few ideas around for years now. Well it's time to sit down, draw up some plans and spend the money.

We live in a small two bedroom house. We've got about an acre of property covered in grass and our house is centered near the top of our property. We've got plenty of land to build out onto and we just completed a major septic system.

Our old septic system was nothing more than a cess pool. It was really just a concrete cylinder in the ground that was probably built back in the 50's using leftover building materials from the house.

About one year ago we began to smell, as well as see, some sewage bubbling up downhill from our cess pool. We knew the system was failing. We also knew the system had never been serviced.

You are probably wondering why the system was never serviced. It was never serviced because it is was a cess pool and not a septic system.

After we smelled it we tried digging over the top of it to find an opening. There was no opening. The top was solid concrete!

We had one of our contractor friends come by with a concrete saw and a drill. It turned out the top of the cess pool was ten inches thick! He had to cut and jack hammer out an opening so we could get it pumped.

Not wanting to pay a monthly fee keeping the thing pumped out we began calling around to get a new system engineered.

Several perk tests later we decided we would have to have our leeching fields uphill from the septic system. The other option was to pay a small fortune on septic sand and putting it downhill.

In all it costs us about $20K to put in the new system.

You can clearly see the the covers for the two buried tanks. The electrical box is for the pump. We still have some issues with small sink holes around the tanks.

We now have a system that uses two large plastic tanks and a pump to move the effluence uphill to our leeching mound.

It’s a bit of a pain to mow around this new mound but it works.

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The front used to be flat, now there is a mound.

I’m still filling in the occasional sink hole around the two tanks as the ground settles around them but at least we now have easy access for getting the system worked on.

You are probably wondering why I bring all this up. Well, we have been planning on expanding our home for a few years now and we were slightly derailed by the expense of the septic system. It did work in our favor though as the old cess pool was directly behind out house and in the way of our renovation plans.

Our current plan is to come off of the back of our home and add a kitchen and laundry area on the main floor. We will likely not go up as it might make the house look weird as it is currently only a one story home.

Our existing basement has a low ceiling and tends to leak in heavy rains. My hope is that by adding on to the main floor we can also get some of the foundation issues fixed as well as adding a significantly sizable room to the basement with a high ceiling.

That room would become my workshop and allow me to do more around the house, as well as provide a retreat.

I know it’s not going to be cheap doing this renovation but we are going to do it and I’m going to try and catalog all the events that transpire here on the blog. It should be interesting reading.

I will be posting pics of the house soon as well as our plans for the addition