Ten Days

Ten days of sponge baths, washing a sink full of dishes with a liter and a half of water (it can be done, if you do it in the right order), and carting drinking water in my miniscule Mazda MX-5 from my father's house, which I admit, is better than having to walk with buckets of water from the town well.  I realize now just how much I have taken indoor plumbing for granted.

The plumber who said "no job is too small!" was supposed to drill a hole under the sidewalk for us so we could upgrade our water service to a larger diameter. He never showed up and never returned our calls.  I'm writing a bad review for him on Yelp!  I helped dig the trenches a little, but mostly I sat around whining pitifully while my housemate did everything.

Finally, yesterday afternoon, we held our breath as he turned the water back on, and ... no water spurted from anywhere it wasn't supposed to be spurting!  He went through the house opening all the taps, and everything worked fine.  After ten days of dreaming about being able to launder my clothes and take a luxurious, steamy shower, I was so relieved and happy that I took a two hour nap!

We are still waiting for the city's inspector to come out tomorrow and sign off, and there is a chance he will make us sink everything down deeper (we're short a few inches in spots), but the hard work is essentially done, and my housemate saved me a few thousand dollars by doing the entire job himself.  I don't know what I would have done without him.

Photo:  The labrador retriever in Piglet comes out when I turn on the hose. She loves to jump in the stream and stick her face in it!

Halcyon Days

I remember when I could sit in the shade of my orange tree, engrossed in a book, sipping iced coffee and crunching on almonds, while the dog patrolled the yard and one of the cats curled beneath my legs, secure in the knowledge that if I happened to spill on myself, as is often the case, I could rinse my clothes in the sink and hop in the shower, and the incident would quickly be just a memory.  My security was compromised in the wee hours last Sunday (see last week's post), when my water line burst.  No running water for me for awhile!

While awaiting the return of my housemate, I showered at my father's house and toted jugs of water from his place to mine.  My housemate finally arrived late Wednesday night and began digging Thursday in the hole I'd started, when he hit a huge mass of roots from the yew tree, which emitted a metal-sounding ping when he hit them.  Those puppies were wrapped around the service line connecting the house to the water company's feed, and they were holding on for dear life so tightly, they broke through.  A good two meters of the iron pipe were badly corroded.

He spent a day figuring out where everything runs.  The feed originally went under the foundation, where it was embedded in a concrete slab under the house and virtually untraceable.  Panic!  And then, he found the feed was diverted to another, easily accessible point, probably due to a previous failure in the line that fed my back house (which was never restored).  We will be replacing the entire line with copper pipe from the service point to the point where the line enters the house.

I helped dig the trench yesterday, a total of 8 meters in length, although we need to hire someone to drill out the last meter and a half under the sidewalk.  That will happen Monday.  In the meantime, the housemate will begin measuring, cutting and sweating pipe for the sections he can complete before then, and installing a pressure regulator.

I am still getting drinking water from dad, but the housemate  rigged up a temporary spigot in the garden for everything else.  At some point, I, the woman who, by choice, used to trudge into the middle of nowhere for days on end without a bath, whimpered about feeling like my house had become a third world country, because I had to bathe using a squeezable water bottle, which was very unsatisfying.  And because I lost one kg for not eating because washing dishes is now an ordeal.  I got no sympathy.  Heavy sigh.

Hopefully, everything will be finished sometime Tuesday, and I will be able to return to my post under the tree, spilling on myself with abandon, and this whole plumbing issue will be a faint memory ... until I receive the bills!

Surprise!

Sometime during the wee hours this morning, a sudden, muffled pop emitted from somewhere outside. My housemate's dog erupted into a barrage of barking and thunderous foot thumping, as she jumped off my bed where she'd been sound asleep a moment before, and raced through the house. I probably should have gotten up to investigate, but I figured if it were any type of animal intrusion (including human), she would have already scared it off. Anything else could wait until morning.
Sometime around 9:30, I rolled out of bed, shuffled through the house, picked up pet bowls, dumped them into the sink, and opened the tap to refill them. A thin line of clear liquid trickled out. I opened the tap more, but got nothing resembling more flow. The bowls filled painfully slowly. After I shut the tap, I heard the sound of water running through pipes somewhere. "Drip system must be on and sprung a leak."

I finished watering and feeding the housemate's and my fuzzy quadripeds, and shuffled out the front door to check the drip system. Two men walking by started waving and saying something in Spanish. I hadn't had coffee yet, so I could only look stupidly. My foot was suddenly cold and I realized they were trying to tell me my yard was flooded. Water was cascading down the planter box.
I turned off the drip system, but the river that was my planter continued to flow. I ran back into the house, tracking in mud, water, pine needles, filled both Brita (water filter) dispensers, threw on shorts and a shirt, grabbed the shutoff key to the water line, and ran back outside to shut down the water feed to my house.

The leak was somewhere behind a yew tree and next to a Meyer lemon bush next to the porch, the most difficult place to reach! The distance between the house (right) and yew (left) is about .75m. Out of the photo, about a meter beyond the lemon is another lemon. To get to the leak, I had to prune back the yew branches, then squeeze myself and my tools between the yew and lemons.

The water had been pooled between lemon and yew, so I began digging there, but when I turned the feed back on to retest, water was coming from the corner formed by the foundation and the porch. Even worse! My housemate is a welder, and is pretty sure he can fix it (he's in Sacramento with his girlfriend for the weekend), but I was seriously contemplating calling a plumber. Then I remembered I'd have to dump a few investments to pay a plumber and they charge extra for Sunday calls! I continued digging. I began a trench next to the porch (the red brick), but it was too narrow, and too cramped, and it could only be about a hand wide without interfering with the lemon's roots. The lemon had to go.

Seven hours later, I had:
1. Made it through the day on a double espresso, an iced coffee, an almond-rum croissant, some almonds and crackers with peanut butter, and a lot of water. I carefully avoided anything with too much fiber or lactose, so I wouldn't have to flush the toilet.
2. Dug up and re-potted the lemon. Sort of. I threw some soil around the roots, but not enough to cover them all, and I had no water for it. I'll probably lose it.
3. Tried to look in the crawlspace under the house to see if water had gotten there and if the pipe might be accessible from there, but the crawlspace entrance is on the opposite side of the house, and spider webs covered the portal. I decided to wait until my housemate gets home to do that.

4. Widened my trench, and dug about a meter down without seeing or feeling anything resembling a pipe.

I gave up for the day and headed to my father's house for a shower and to steal several containers of water from him. Well, I know what I'm doing tomorrow...