As I sit here wondering where in my allergy sleepless haze summer went, I realize I do have a story for you.

Our water gets a little cloudy during the summer. No biggie – either a lot of heat (which we had) or a lot of rain )which we also had) will make it like this.

Then it got muddy.

And then the pump ran and ran.

And then we had no water.

This was Sunday.

Then we had a couple days of trying all of one day to fill the water pipe near the pump with water enough to try and pull something from the well. And we checked the well and tried to look in it. Water was a loooong way down. We trudged over to the neighbours with jugs to fill. We went into triage mode for Things That need Water and Things We Can Get By On. We did camping baths. We wracked our brains thinking up food to cook that didn’t take water.

And today the plumbers came! They were a couple of young taller beefy guys. Nice boys. (yes, I *am* someone’s grandma, thank you very much.) They had a camera and a wire and a monitor to hook it up to. It was majorly cool and I am kicking myself for not getting any pictures. We got to see how far down our well goes and what it looks like in there.

Tho when you put things in the well and hear chunks falling off the side, that is not good.
When the camera goes by the foot valve and the plumbers start shaking their heads and telling each other something that amount to “look at the crap job” that’s not good either.When they get to the top of the water around 16 feet? Or the bottom of the well around 20? Yeah. Not fun either.

Not to mention the floaters. Ew. The boys explain it looked like there’s been a cave in as well, in addition to the stuff knocked off the sides. Imagine how much builds up after 50 years.

Then since we had to explain there was in fact no water in the pipe from the well to the house, the boys all went into the creepy basement to get the pump to pump what water there was.

And THAT was the kicker. Turns out there’s a leak in the pipe from the well to the house. The consensus we got was two choices:

1 – drill a new well.

2 – dig up the pipe between the house (running under the paved driveway) to the well (in our garage) and pretty much demolish everything in between.

We picked door number 1! We are delaying doing this, as we’re talking $25 a foot to drill, plus $15 a foot for however far down they put a casing. The guy remembers doing the well for the red house behind us and thinks it was a hundred feet.

For now, we implemented the temporary fix suggested by the super smart plumbers. (I heart them. One of them could marry one of my daughters. They’ve got job security.)

We took the pump out of the basement and put it in the garage, near the top of the well. We went into town and got 100 feet of pipe. Then we ran some from the pump down the top of the well to the water, and from the other end of the pump, across the top of the driveway, through the closed over window under the side porch, right back into the basement with the end hooked up to the inside pipes where the pump was.

Huzzah! Water in the house again.

Obviously we can’t leave the temporary fix there because winter come and everything freezes. Then we’d have no water and a broken pump. So! Making sure the boys come back at the end of September.

Nice shiny new well. Clean sparkling water. Was the one thing in the house we never thought we’d have to replace… “oh that house has the best well in the neighbourhood!”

It’s just the little things that make me happy, you know?