Meet sewer line connaisseur Mr. McBee, owner of Ted McBee Boring & Excavating, our preferred local resource of the last 15 years for navigating and remedying the tricky and unpredictable world of sewer line repairs. But his actual experience runs much deeper than that (no pun intended!) as a second-generation family-owned business. Over the years, we have found that Steve consistently goes the extra mile with his assessments, and his is the only firm out there that guarantees these often expensive and intrusive corrections with a lifetime warranty. No other local firm puts that in writing.
Video sewer scopes have been a normal part of home inspections for more than 20 years. Property owners are responsible for maintaining their sewer line’s condition to where it connects with the city main; but the history on their installations is as varied as the lines themselves, which often fail inspections due to separations and root intrusions that occur and are not perceptible to the homeowner. These make for very unhappy surprises, so it is key to have an expert eye like Steve’s unravel the details to provide competent solutions.
Recently, we caught Steve in-action while doing a sewer line replacement for a buyer client in inner Southeast; and he was nice enough to answer a few questions for us. Thanks, Steve!
How long have you been doing this work?
I’ve been doing this work 25 years; my brother, who is foreman on the job, has been doing it about 35. We are a family-owned business, a small company which makes it easy to control quality. I had a dozen workers at one time, and it was really hard to keep a close eye on everything everyone was doing, so this is a little easier.
We put a lifetime warranty on our work which is kind of heavy. By law you only have to do one year, which is what a lot of companies do; some do offer 5. We offer a lifetime and we do what it takes to make sure that I can walk away from it and know that those people are taken care of. It’s a lot of peace of mind for everyone. Some people care about it. Some are more concerned about money, so if they can find someone a little cheaper they’ll go that route. We get a lot of jobs where another company had been there before. Recently we worked for an older lady who’d been in her house 40 years; she had to have the sewer line repaired 3 times; she was crying because it was poorly done the first two times and so it was just brutal. The house was her pride and joy. We hate to see situations like that.
What do you love most about what you do?
I love the people the most, and helping young guys mature in life and their work, how they learn to interact with clients. One of the cool things is that we get to move a lot, we’re not at a specific location long, we move from location to location and each job has its own set of challenges so it’s not repetitive that way; it’s always something new. I did a desk job for 12 years, and I was so happy to come back outside and work in the field. It’s so awesome.
What is your best trait or ability?
Probably the biggest thing is quality of work, attention to detail. We do a superb job of restoration so that when get done here we hope we can leave it looking like we haven’t even been here and maybe after a couple months of rain and the ground settling, the grass growing, it should be indiscernible that we’ve been here. Everyone that does business with us knows that we do quality restoration, kinda like it’s our own house, we don’t want to leave a mess. High quality service, good quality work, high quality restoration, and our warranty is pretty rare.
Tell us about a really challenging job that you still managed to complete for a client. Why was it so challenging?
A recent job is high on that radar. Ground conditions were ferocious, really loose, gravely, very little dirt content so it just ran like sand. We were 8 feet deep, 10 feet wide so it was really hard to shore up – in other words, put protective devices in the hole to protect the workers as they’re working. So we would dig down and the walls would come in, we’d dig down and more would come in. It was hard on morale for the guys, and very challenging to set up the shoring correctly so we could feel good about putting the guys in the hole working. The cool thing about that one is once we were done putting the pipe in, the guys worked really hard, restored this lady’s yard, put flowers back, walkways back, and it took a considerable amount of time to do that and leave a finished product. She was blown away, all the people involved are blown away, and the guys feel really good about it. It was a 4 day job that took 8 days, so we’re really happy to be here at this next job.
Our industry resources are behind-the-scenes experts in their trades, who make our clients happier and our transactions smoother on a regular basis. We are so grateful for them. If you would like the contact information for any of our partners, please don’t hesitate to ask!
Photo Credit: Autumn Stark Photography
