Old School

A lot has happened since I posted last. I am a bad blogger.

We've been working on getting the basic systems up and running.

Roofing
Um... We've decided to do the roofing repairs ourselves. We've always been DIY hippie types, but middle-classitude must have rubbed off during all the years of the university job. Yep, hire it done! Take out a loan and hire everything done.

So we snapped out of it. I'm cutting out the big wrinkles, nailing the edges and covering the area with black sticky goop and mesh. Thanks to my friend Tom the Handyman and Craig the Roofer for getting me started. I may need help on the four really bad spots, but can certainly do the many, many wrinkles.

Water
We had pressure at the well, and next to none at the house. The top element (new, installed by Tom) in the water heater burned out as water was coming into the tank too slowly. Tom tried cleaning sediment  out of a bunch of faucet valves and replacing some faucets and it was better, but he was convinced that there was a big leak in the line from the well to the building. So we called in the pump guy (Gady Pumps in Colbert, Wash.) and Phil checked everything out and said the well was good, the pump good, but Tom was right, there was a leak someplace in the line. So we called American Leak Detection (great name!) and a fellow came out and listened closely to the ground. What a specialized line of work. Anyway, he found a big leak on the far side of the building (not where the water line was supposed to be), borrowed a shovel and exposed the problem – some doof had highjacked an irrigation line to supply the caretaker's trailer with water. And when the trailer was removed in 2006 (?) the wrong side of the pipe was capped, leaving water gushing into the sandy soil for years. We're lucky the well and pump held up. So I capped the line and now we have plenty of water, hot and cold.

Septic
We had some issues with the drains, including some backing up into the shower drain, so we rented a big rooter snake and I sat there for a few hours feeding the cable into four of the many (11 or 12, I think) toilet flanges in this big weird place. It wasn't horrible, just boring, and the drains are working pretty well now.