A Wellspring of Troubles

Prior to the two weeks we had relatives visiting that wanted to stay at the Ranger Station (the house where my husband and I used to live), we had some dirty work to do. The old waterline needed replaced.

A couple of years ago, we had renters that said they kept running out of water in the house. My husband did some investigating and found a spot of wet ground where a leak in the old waterline from the cistern to the house was leaking. About the time we discovered the problem, the renters moved on and the waterline repair work got put on the backburner until we were forced to deal with it before my brother in-law and his family came.
The week before they arrived, we had a new line dug from the well to the house. The easy plan was to bypass the old line which went from the well to the cistern and back down to the house (confused yet?) and hook up the new line into the old one down in the basement. It all seemed simple enough.

After the trench line was dug, we discovered we’d trenched up to a false wall instead of the wall closest to the pressure tank in the basement, which was the first of our problems. Getting through the wall and hooking up to the existing waterline was the second problem and took a couple of days to get a hole established for the line to go through.

Once everything was hooked up more problems popped up like popcorn. We had good water pressure and water that cleared up after only a minute but then the pump plugged up with sand, so we had to reset the pump a bit higher which solved that problem. After we had water flowing steady, a leak in the basement was discovered, then one in the toilet tank and one in the bathroom facet. There was running water, just not hot water, so the heating element needed replaced in the water heater. The most recent discovery is that the sewer’s backed up.

So for the two weeks that our company stayed at the Ranger Station, they didn’t have hot water or a flushing toilet; just a portable one. We’ve never been accused of doing things the easy way, like addressing the problem as soon as it’s discovered before more problems arise to save ourselves a lot of work. Some days feel like we never catch a break and if we do, they leak and make a big fat mess.

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