Alex and Rachael need Emergency Sewer Repairs

Hi, my name is Alex, and my wife Rachael and I are fundraising for emergency plumbing repairs.

The short version of this is that on June 12, one of us was in the shower and heard the toilet bubbling, and then the drain started draining the water very slowly. Thinking it was just a clog, my wife tried plunging, which didn't work, then later tried pouring some plumbing chemicals down the drain, which also didn't work. Later, some sludge started bubbling up from the shower and the toilet wouldn't flush at all so we called a plumber. The plumber was here for several hours that same day trying to snake three different drains because of how messed up our plumbing was. He ended up pulling a lot of roots out and scheduled us for a different guy to come out and inspect our pipes with a camera. On June 13, the second plumber came out with a camera and could not even get it more than 10 feet into the line. There was standing water in the pipe and everything on the camera went black. Our main sewer line had collapsed and there was major root intrusion. The plumber who came out the second time happened to have investigated the same issue right before we bought this house in 2022 with the previous owner. The previous owner knew about the issue, didn't fix it, and didn't disclose the problem. Unfortunately we have no legal recourse where we live. The bad news is that over several estimates, repairs are going to cost us between $18-24k due to the difficulty factor and having to dig up the road and sidewalk in front of our house and then repair them and our retaining wall. The good news is there is financing available, which we will qualify for but can't really afford unless we want to eat ramen for the next 10 years.

The longer version of our story is why we can't even afford the financing. In 2020, Rachael and I lived in California. I was laid off from my job due to the pandemic closing down my workplace and was unable to find any work. Rachael was holding us above water barely with her hours also being cut due to Covid. We had begun accumulating a little bit of debt because of this, but it wasn't really that big of a deal and we were managing, paying off what we could. I received a job offer at a nonprofit aquarium in Idaho where I interned during university and in June 2020 we found a house for rent, packed up, and moved to Idaho.

Things were going great for a while. We spent two years saving up for a down payment on a modest house, working on paying off the rest of our debt, and finally closed on what we are now working on making our dream home in May of 2022. A few weeks after we moved into our new home, I lost my job.

I worked as the development director at the nonprofit aquarium I mentioned earlier, liaising with the community to raise money for the animals at the aquarium and create great education programs for the local schools. Several of us who worked there and were essential employees discovered that the executive director was stealing a lot of this money for himself and his mistress (who also worked there). This did not sit well with any of us, I didn't like bringing in money from the community only for it to be abused, and after months of gathering evidence and communicating with the board, we had a huge meeting where nine of the 13 essential employees gave our two-week notice and walked out after the board refused to do anything about it. However, most of us were not even allowed to finish out our last two weeks because we ended up being fired without pay. I didn't have a paycheck for almost three weeks until I could start my new job. I filed for unemployment, but the aquarium director was fighting it, so the labor department had to do a huge investigation, which delayed my unemployment by close to a month.

I started my new job, making even less money than I was before (and all of us at the aquarium were severely underpaid as it was). Because of this, Rachael and I had to put many of our essential needs on credit cards and ended up racking up quite a bit of debt for a few months. In July of 2022, my wife's doctor found a lump in her breast and she had to undergo a lot of imaging and tests that were not covered by our insurance, putting us into even more debt. I got another new job working at a local school and a second job at a convenience store. Rachael worked her regular 9-5 and made some extra money on the side doing freelance art. In January 2023 I had an emergency room visit, which we are still paying off. We worked hard for the last year to work on paying some of our debt, but emergencies kept happening that would clear out any small savings we could manage. Within the same week this plumbing issue came up and we got hit with a bill from the IRS for $900, which is going to completely clear out our savings yet again.

We have barely been able to shower or use water for the past several days. We have been using the bathroom at the park or store down the street, will probably have to shower at friends' houses, and have had to buy paper and plastic plates/utensils.

We are fundraising to hopefully be able to pay for these plumbing fixes and maybe pay off some of our medical debt.

Thank you for reading. We both appreciate any help we can get.