Streamwood family grateful for plumbers’ good deed

In the past few weeks, laundry became a real chore for Shelly Dvorsky of Streamwood.

As the clothes started swishing in the washing machine, the toilet and bathtub in her one-bathroom home would fill with excess water, to the point of overflowing. She would stop the machine, let some water drain, and then turn it back on for a few minutes. The process could take more than five hours.

“We were going to stores to use the bathroom,” she said.

Dvorsky and her husband, Dominic, who just started working again after being out of a job for nearly a year, decided to call Chris Martin, owner of Rooter Inc., an East Dundee-based plumbing and sewer company, in hopes he could tell them what was wrong.

Martin explained that about 10 feet of piping in their sewer system had collapsed and it would cost around $4,500 to fix.

But without a second income for so long the Dvorskys couldn’t afford the repairs.

“(Martin) said ‘Well, if you can come up with $2,000 ...’ and I was like, ‘We better just settle up for today,’” Dvorsky said, adding that they are behind in mortgage payments, and living paycheck to paycheck. “We just didn’t have the money.”

After he left their house, Martin couldn’t stop thinking about how vital it would be for the Dvorsky’s to get their problem fixed.

He decided the only option was to fix the sewer system for them — for free. That night he met with friend Tim Schuler, owner of T & C Plumbing in East Dundee, and the two agreed they would do the good deed for the couple and their 7-year-old son.

“We really didn’t want to leave them without a sewer,” Martin said. “They just didn’t have the financial ability to do it.”

When Martin called Dvorsky with the news she was speechless.

“I was in tears, I couldn’t even talk to him,” she said. “I don’t want to take handouts. But our backs were kind of against the wall.”

Martin, Schuler and two of their workers spent more than seven hours Monday excavating the Dvorsky’s front lawn, removing the broken sewer line and replacing it with new pipes. They covered all the expenses, and the village of Streamwood waived the fee for a permit.

This is the second time in a year that Martin has done a job for free, but he said the extra money he put out for both families doesn’t bother him.

“It feels good to be able to help someone out,” he said.