I wish Number Two wasn't Number One on my mind right now

Arghhh. I apologize YET again for the lack of entertaining, happy blogs on my site.
We are dealing with YET again, toilet and sewer line issues, which are gross and worrisome enough to shove all thoughts of happy entertainment right outta my head.
We bought our house 3 years ago- it's old as the hills. Seriously. The deed says it was built in 1864, but when I worked for a historic preservation organization, I found proof that there had been a mortgage on the property going back ten years or so. We have at least three different kinds of foundations in our creepy silence-of-the-lambs basement which attest to its age and growth cycles.
It was in one family for all those years until the early 1990s when someone decided to make it a student rental property. Then all hell broke loose.
Our house was called the Plank House. It was the punk students' party house. In addition to various damage (including a hella lot of smashed glass out back- I think they were pulling storm windows off and smashing them for fun) there was a giant hole in the dining room ceiling they used to jump through to get from 2nd floor to 1st. How do I know this? Pizza was delivered by a former resident of the Plank House who peeked his head in and said, "Aww, you got the hole fixed?"

dining room

It was purchase by a nice guy around 2005 with the intent of fixing it up & flipping it. He did a damn good job, as we would've had no idea about the dining room ceiling hole if it weren't for Stoner McTrippy. He put in new copper pipes, new electrical, A/C, new appliances, new furnace & water heater, fixed all the head-shaped divots in the walls and painted them historically-accurate colors. Then he got transferred down near NYC & had to sell. This is where we came in.
We'd been enjoying the hell out of our house until this past February when the downstairs toilet stopped working and something unspeakable happened in the tub/shower. I'm serious when I say unspeakable. We won't speak of it. We don't want to be spoken to about it. Let's pretend that never happened.

kitchen

Anyway, we had a plumber come to the house and he freaked us the F out when he wasn't able to snake far enough to the clog and said there was a chance we'd have to have the main line dug out and replaced. Then he went into our front yard and said he didn't know how they would even be able to do THAT as our house is set down and back from the road and there's a guardrail in the way. Then he discovered our house trap out front. Snaked it, all was good with the world. Whew.
Until this summer and we had our yearly maintenance done. Part of that included cleaning the house trap. Cool. Problem was, right after that, the toilet wouldn't flush again. Thankfully, we didn't have another Unspeakable Incident, but it was upsetting nonetheless. We had the plumber people come back, since it had been working fine before he was there, and he snaked us out and all was well. He did tell us that he thinks our main line that connects our house to the city sewer line has a low spot where it settled, so stuff just hangs out there and causes the toilet not to empty. He felt we could just get it snaked every once in awhile and be good.

living room

But then last night, here we go again. Brett bought a sewer rod in the hopes we could take care of this ourselves, but it wouldn't make its way around the curve in the pipe. Our head of maintenance at my job was kind enough to offer to snake it before for us and has suggested a solution that may run us a couple hundred bucks, but if it fixes the problem and keeps us from having to tear out a guardrail and dig up our yard to the tune of several thousand bucks, it will be worth it.
But I am seriously considering building an outhouse in my backyard. Enough of this shit.