Roto-Rooter, WHAT?!?

Okay, here's the sitch - We have some sort of major clog in our water pipes.

Starting about 2 weeks ago some crazy stuff started happening. If we run a wash in the washing machine it backs up into the bathtub and toilet (making it overflow if we don't shut off the washer and let the water slowly drain) when the cycle drains. When we shower, the tub ends up with about 4 inches of water that takes forever to drain, and you can't flush the toilet while the tub is slowly draining or the toilet will fill up with water instead of flushing properly.

Clearly, this is an issue. So, we called Roto-Rooter to come out and look at the problem and hopefully rectify the situation.

Well - and I don't know the situation firsthand because H is the one who was here when the plumber came - first I get a call from him saying that they needed to find some sort of outside drain trap - whatever that is - but apparently they can't locate it, so they have someone else come out to the house to run some sort of camera snakey-thing down through something to see where the thing is. This will cost us at least $250. What the Hell?!

I get a second later call, apparently Plumber 2 was able to tell that we apparently don't have one of these outdoor trappy things - but we need one - so didn't charge us anything, but DID write up a quote for us for... are you ready for this? $3200! AHH!

Apparently, according to this guy, they can't deal with the clog that's in our main sewer line, without completely re-doing our sewer set-up to bring it up to code! Code?!?! Our house was built in 1965! I'm not going to re-do everything to bring it up to current code at this point! Can't you just deal with the clog for us?! No.

So, we are DEFINITELY going to get a second opinion. I'm NOT paying more than $3000 so that I can run a load of wash. H also did some research online and it looks like we may be able to get to the clog ourselves fairly easily. We may try this first - what can it hurt? - before we try to pay someone else out of pocket for it. I'm certainly not going to be paying an arm and a leg to re-do a sewer system set-up that seems to work fine, except for this clog of course... Ick.