Well, it's a deep subject

Home ownership is awesome. I have owned my home for nearly 12 years now. I love painting the walls anyway I want and not answering to anyone about any changes I might make. It's a good feeling when I pay my mortgage rather than flushing rent down the toilet toward someone else's benefit. But there are the downsides. If something breaks it's our problem to deal with and pay for. There is no landlord to call and say, "it's broke. Come fix.". This can be a small as a slight drip under the sink or as large as total roof failure. As a home owner you can take on as much or as little as you want. Maybe for you the best is owning a condo where you pay homeowners dues and someone else manages the landscaping for you and you have just a small space to care for or maybe it's a quarter of an acre or several acres. For me, it's twelve acres with several structures on it and well away from city provisions. This means that while I am on the grid for electricity I have two septic tanks and a well that are my joy to have because no one is telling me what I can and can't water or flush and my responsibility when things don't go right.

The privious owner was, to be nice about it, ignorant.
We have spent a great deal of time and money and sweat correcting his blunders over the last decade and once you get into the problem it's always worse than what you thought it was and twice as expensive to fix.

The septic to the original house had to be dug up and inspected because once we started pulling permits for the new house to be built we found that 1st owner had started the permit but never had it signed off. It and all the leach lines had to be uncovered. Funn.

The well is the current and on going headache. I suppose that for a man with an 8th grade education he should be given credit for what he did but for the amount of time that it has taken my husband away from us to manage it I will not forgive. He did things overboard, above and beyond what is nessacary because, by golly, if one foot down for pipe was what was nessasary, three feet would be better, right? So to dig it up we have to go way down. Then we find that the wire for the pump is wrapped around the water pipe, all the easier to break while digging. The wire is cheap, whatever He could afford at the time, not really the best for the job and you need to have special skillz to understand His rational for whee all the pipes lead to, where the shut off valves go to and so on.

This summer one of our goals was to finally put an end to our misery and get all this straightened out. Get the holding tank, the pressure tank, the pump the electrical all working together and in one place instead of in multiple places, and cut out the useless go nowhere pipes and set it up so even I can look at it know what's going on.

We're nearly there. The best part will be that even when the power is out we'll still have water! This also involved moving the generator to where it would actually do the whole property some good.

With all of that moved and re-established the third part of the plan will come together and thats where the chickens, ducks, and soon geese will get a new house with all the comforts. Heat, water that won't freeze in the winter, room for everyone and easy to clean out.

Back to the well. My husband is the DIY kind of guy and before you start imagining all the horror shows you see on the DIYnetwork, he really is skilled at what he does. The type of problems we run into are more along the lines of not having all the supplies needed or running out after running into unforeseen, previous owner, problems and the supply store being a thirty or forty minute trip away. That brings us to today. Got as far as getting the water from the tank pumped to the pressure tank and supplying the property but out of what was needed to get the water from the well into the tank. No biggy, we just use from the tank until Husband can come home after work today with the parts and finish. Except-- there are a number of small but significant water draws all over. Between toilets and keep full animal water buckets and auto sprinkler/water systems, in less than 24 hours we are down several thousand gallons of water.

So until this evening we are without water. A very familiar place with small inconveniences that we are more than accustomed to. We are just holding our breath till tonight when the last part of the system is glued in and we will be up and running again more reliably than ever before.

Still, it would have been nice if it had been done right in the first place. I'm not saying you have to have a bunch of schooling, just saying its ok to pick up a book now and then. Never let your schooling interfere with your education. -Mark Twain