Plumbing in an old house

We've been having issues with our kitchen sink for awhile, but it got really bad this week when it completely stopped draining.  We'd had the drain snaked a few weeks ago when it was slow to drain and that didn't help.  So then we had the septic tank pumped early this week, and that didn't help.  It took a day for our handyman to be able to come check things out again and he crawled up under the house in our crawl space.

The black pipe is our kitchen pipe

He found that the pipe that was coming out of the sink came down, but then arched up, declined again, arched up again, and then dropped again to the main pipe lines.  His theory was that there wasn't enough water pressure and the water and debris was getting stuck in those areas that went up.  He wanted to cut that pipe out, put a new pipe in, and set it up to have a consistent decline to the main line.

I was doubtful.  I figured if there was water in that pipe, it should still flow out simply because there was so much.  I thought for sure that after he fixed the decline, it would still need to be snaked.

For two days we had to hand wash dishes and then scoop the water out of the sink with a pitcher and take it outside to dump it.  Time consuming, annoying, and just gross.

The handyman was able to come over this morning and he got to work in the basement.  It turns out that there is another room in the crawl space that I didn't know about that goes under the kitchen area.  He was down there for a few hours before he told me to turn on the kitchen sink.  Sure enough, the water flowed right down the drain.

He was right!

I got some pictures of the pipes that he pulled out of the basement because, quite frankly, it was disgusting.



It was gross looking, but really I just wanted to know what it was that had built up and clogged it.

The pipe was completely blocked.  There was no light that I could see through this section and it was only about 3 feet long.  

We knocked some of it out just to figure out what it was and the pieces that came out were solid, like a block of cheddar cheese.  Some of it has definitely been in there for many years (verified by the handyman).  

First thing that I did was run over and press the button to start the dishwasher.