The Mystery Pipe

A few months ago, during excavation and demolition on the house, the workers encountered a strange pipe. The pipe was connected into the sewage box of the house, but did not seem to come from the property. Even more mysterious was the fact that on occasion, the pipe was delivering water... dirty water. Attempting to follow the pipe to it's source confirmed that it was coming from a location off our property, and pretty soon we were able to confirm that it is a sewage pipe coming from my neighbor's back toilet!

Porto is a very old city, and most of the construction in our area seems to predate indoor plumbing. The original bathrooms in our house were built as a closet size room on the back patio. This is not unusual with old houses like ours. When we were looking to buy a property, we found that almost every house we saw had a toilet built onto the back of the property in a tiny closet (usually only accessible from the exterior of the building). There were of course showers, kitchens and other bathrooms inside, but they were likely added much latter, and most of the houses seemed to keep the extra bathroom in the back, which was probably the first installed.

From the looks of the situation in our house, it seems that when these back bathrooms were built, there wasn't much concern about isolating the plumbing connections. It seems probable that the municipality built the sewage line and then all the houses on the street built a toilet on the back. Probably this happened in the late 17th or early 18th century, but in a lot of cases, those back toilets still exist. Since they were likely built on many houses at the same time, sharing the connection through one house was just seen as a natural expediency.  Who would guess that 300 years latter it would cause some future owner (me) a painful headache?

When we discovered the situation, the natural assumption was that it would be our neighbor's responsibility to fix it.  However, we anticipated that this was going to be a problem. The pipe is in the back of the property, and all the houses on our street are all joined wall to wall, so for my neighbor to fix the pipe, he would have to dig up a large part of the ground floor of his building. Even before I contacted him, I was anticipating that we would probably have to come to some kind of agreement.

Here's where I got a big surprise. It turns out that my neighbor had already discovered this situation, and tried to fix it, but the municipal water company told him it cannot be changed at this time! It turns out that this situation is common enough in Porto that there is even a law in place that makes it MY RESPONSIBILITY to keep my neighbors pipe connected though our house!

The water company has told my neighbor that he cannot fix this pipe for 5 years because they need to dig up the sewage line in front of his house first, and the work is not scheduled now. I'm still investigating, but apparently, we are legally required to literally take my neighbors shit until then!