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?

With the electrician.

Yeah, he was here. Yeah, he fixed the main breaker. (Wait till I upload the pics.) Yeah, he explained a few things that made us go “ooohhhhh… that’s why it was so freaky…”

So tonight we relax a bit and tomorrow we finish up.

Actually, I’m kind of shaking my head and laughing, since at this point we’ve been through a LOT and really this is just par for the course now, you know? At any rate, I’ll squash my flair for the dramatic and get on with the storytelling.

I think it was Thursday, late in the day. Ron was working on the septic field part, and the pump we’re installing. It need a plug, and all he had to do was run the wire, plop in a new breaker on the panel and hook it up. Pretty straightforward.

Except, you know, this is our house.

I mean, he did it right – it’s one of those things you either know how to do or you don’t, and if you know how to do it, it’s pretty hard to screw it up barring any ambulance showing up. But apparently just touching the electrical panel has set off a cascade of events to highlight every single ineffective and jerry-rigged piece of wiring in the entire house.

First, the entire right side of the panel kept shutting off. Just the right side. Fearing faulty breakers, Ron replaced a few of them on that side. Great – now we are at the point where at least more than half the house isn’t dark.

Now we’re stuck in the kitchen – a room that has 4 plug sockets, not including the one for the stove, where almost every one is on a different circuit. Every one of them is acting up. Including the stove, which is an entirely different voltage. It works, the clock is on, but now burners and the oven randomly shut down.

The plug behind the fridge has a new plug socket and the wire runs straight from it to the panel. It can’t keep a light on for more than a few seconds.

My office here was on the side of the panel shutting down. Weirdly enough, our bedroom is on the other side, so we’ve run an extension cord from there to here so at least we can work without things going *pouf* like they did a few times on Friday.

We’re waiting for the second electrician to call us back. Our phone was out too.

My mom says the house is winning. We kinda sorta joked before that we’d have to replace all the wiring in the house, and it’s looking like a reality.

See, in addition to the purging items I don’t want, some of it has been hitting another pile labeled “to sell on the internet”. Mostly destined for Etsy, but some for ebay.

I decided to do a “quick” sort of the to-sell stuff and make two piles. It was scattered around in boxes, and as I lugged each one into my craft room, it got bigger and bigger. I was laying out the “to fix” pile so I could take a picture. The “to fix” pile is any item that needs washing, repairs, a retrofit, or made up into some sort of goods (usually a tote bag) before I could list it.

I lost my floor again.

The whole time I was plowing through it all, the only thing I could think of was apologizing to the husband. You see, as we were taking things *out* of the house, a lot of my scoping out of yard sales and thrift stores has been with an eye for what sells online. (I’m not just guessing here, I’m paying attention to trends, picking up one or two to check out when I get home, and if I hit gold, grab more next time I see some.) So for that past couple of years – especially since we moved, although it started before then, I’ve been amassing things to sell online. In the words of my husband, “We’re supposed to be getting RID of things, not bringing new things IN to the house!”

I did have good plans, I was building a site to sell my own goods from, like my own etsy, run by me. Well, honestly at this point, I haven’t done squat except tear it down and partially rebuild it, twice. Plus I don’t have the time to market it. A slight change in plans, and this past week or two I signed up on etsy, plus listed a few things on ebay – just to start things off.

Well, looking at the stack of items and realizing I could stock a small storefront tells me I’d better get cracking.

And Ron was right. (I hate when that happens.) No more yard sales for me until I make a dent in the pile. I’m feeling especially masochistic and wondering exactly how much I spent. Not all of it I bought; some is my old stuff, some inherited and willing to be let go of, and some just stuff people gave me. All told, I think there’s a good hundred dollars of investment there.

In yard sale prices, that’s quite a pile.

A small list for the curious:
- 28 items of clothing, 16 of them dresses, 21 of the items are vintage
- 6 aprons
- 73 books
- 18 linens of some sort
- 64 patterns, most 30 + years old
- 20 + different craft supply items (in my own defense, some of this is yet more leftovers from my craft store, which has been closed for 6 years)

I’ll be allocating time on the weekends to list items, rather than go yard sailing. And yes I *am* embarrassed with myself.

How can we get so much stuff *in* there?
Why does all the dirt then collect itself on me?
Why don’t I do it more often?

Oh yeah, it’s exhausting, dusty (I’m allergic), makes me feel like crap, and gets me cranky.

But at least this time my abdomen did not hurt and I wanted to clean up. Maybe I’m finally “better”.

I’m sure there’s another point I wanted to make when I started this post, but I’ve since forgotten it. Meanwhile, the study – the room next to the living room – is an absolute disaster area. Since it’s holding the stuff that doesn’t belong in the lviing room. Oh yeah, now I remember! Does it strike anyone else that a large part of cleaning up is just shuffling items from one end of the house to the other?

All cold and empty and neglected. Poor house. So we bought it – rescued it really, loving it and now fixing it up. Admittedly, we haven’t got very far yet and there’s still boxes everywhere. But look at it now.

Doesn’t it look happer? I mean, even despite the better lighting and the still-falling-apart-ness.

I love you house. It’s okay, we’ll have you all better as soon as we can. Starting when the mountain of snow melts. (We’ve made lists. Lots of them.)

I mean, we did pick this house in this spot for some pretty good reasons. I’m uploading more pictures, so be sure to click on through to Flickr and check them out.

Ron and I are running errands today – in and out of the house, up and down the highway. He stopped in to the hardware store earlier to pick up a load of pellets. While there, he asked about window prices. We have a whole lot of them – 19 or 21 are all the same size, all original, all pretty darn cold what with the single pane of wavy glass. They are 2 feet by 5 feet. Large. They all need to be replaced. But the hardware store has a decent price for one, a lot less than we thought – about $300. That was the good news for today. (There’s 39 windows & exterior doors in total – most, if not all, will be replaced.)

I hadn’t mentioned anything sooner, because it has been a whirldwind of emotions and roller-caster action, and a whole mounting pile of stress and debt, with details that somtiems changed daily and made my head spin. In the end though, I am not sure how I feel overall. I’m glad to be done with it. Glad the Sword of Damocles is no longer hanging overhead. The expenses were a killer (like I said), the dramas dealing with buyers were ulcer-inducing. And even I, who usually sleeps just fine, had trouble sleeping over it at some point.

But we lived in it for six years. Made it a home. Loved it and fixed it up. Made the house happy, I think.

There are so many things I want to say to the new home owner, stuff she needs to know. At least to me, woman of the house to new woman of the house.

Clean the kitchen counter with bleach every so often – the pots will mark it up. Keep the attic door closed in winter and open in summer. Wash the original hardwood with water only. That cabinet door sticks. Keep this window locked – oh, and you can flip them down to clean, see? But the windows facing the road dust up horrible in summer from all the traffic. It’s almost a losing battle to try and keep them white. Polish the woodwork with Orange Glo.

Did you find the secret cupboard by the window seat? That glass sign was there when we moved in. We left it for you to find. Same with the extra tiles in the attic. I know the only place they are is on the hearth. There’s a couple loose tiles around the edges. Don’t vacuum them up by accident.

When the snow melts you’ll see the garden. Did you see pictures of it beforehand? There’s a stargazer lily off by itself. It comes up after the other daylillies. My friend Sylvia gave it to me. (I must call her.) Oh, there’s a stray purple pansy that comes up by the walkway, near the chives. It keeps coming back year after year. We planted the chives, the irises, and the daylillies. The delphiniums were there when we got there. We planted the pear tree and all those strawberries too, when we cleaned up the yard.

When you’re there, wave over the fence to Rose. She’s nice. And she makes great strawberry jam. Behind you are the other neighbours – Pauline and Jake – you can count on them in a pinch. They’ll be driving by often. Across the way is Agnes, who is a sweetheart, but if you can spare a minute for her, make sure it’s at least 30. She’ll talk your ear off.

Go up in the trees behind the house – the shade is wonderful in summer. Watch out for the starlings in spring, they’ll buzz you. By the big maple tree is a rock with a name carved in it. That’s my boy. You may find at the base of a few trees some small bits that look like fairy houses. That’s my girls.

The hedge grows like a weed. The shade garden in the corner there is all whites and purples. The roses out front along the porch is also our doing. The light pink ones need extra care. We found them at the corner of the yard, half-buried in road debris, so we cleaned them up and replanted half of it. The other half is technically on the neighbour’s side. Frank knows a lot about the neighbourhood – talk to him.

Oh, and the street cleaners and plows put a lot of dirt and crap on the first six feet of lawn along the main road. I wouldn’t plant anything nice there. The french lilac bush out front should be nice this spring. It flowered last year for the first time.

There’s a framed picture in the living room that we left. It’s an arial shot. You’ll find the house near the bottom – it’s white and the yard is nothing but lawn. Well, it was taken over thirty years ago. We bought it at an auction when another neighbour died. She was in the little green house on the corner. We felt the picture should at least stay in the neighbourhood.

It’s just a house, but we loved it, despite its flaws. We hope you’ll love it too.

Goodbye Green House.

It’s also on the northwest corner. You can imagine what it’s been like, especially on the brutally cold night with strong winds.  At one point, we pulled the bed away from the walls because it was too chilly. So , we decided it would be better to move to the small “baby” room at the top of the stairs.

But first we had to clean it up, as it had some boxes stored in there, some tools and it was the room we had ripped the floor up in to find wiring.

Last night we just had the bed and alarm clock in there, so today I’ll be moving in the dresser and the clothes. It has a smaller closet, no rod and no shelves, just hooks. Ron will put up some shelving for his things, as he uses the huge wardrobe in the green bathroom for his dress clothes for work.

At any rate, the floral bedroom closet was cavernous and dark, also without rod, but with huge deep shelves and no light. It would make a great soundbooth for podcasts though *cough* Sage *cough*. (bundle up, and we’ll knock before we flush the toilet on the other side of the wall). We’ll keep the door to that room closed, and even after an hour we noticed a difference.

So the little nursey we’re in will probably work out fine for us, especially once I get the two huge east-facing windows covered in dark fabric. It was a little bright when the sun rose.

It was warmer though.

***

Go visit Jay. She wrote some nice things about one of my pictures.

While running wires again last night, we figured out a couple things. The holes in the joists where the wires ran through were made with a hand drill. This was evidenced by all the chunks of wood chips which were half circles and slightly angular. This also explained why the holes were not quite level. Made it hard to pull on the wires.

So I was comforted a little, that eighty-some-odd years ago, some guy in overalls had to contort himself across the floor, just like we were. Except we were undoing all his hard work and replacing it.

Inside the floor, between the joists, is the aforementioned wood chips, some dust & dirt, some plaster chunks and the occasional bit of interest, like that tag we found. This time, I found a neat square of plaster face down almost under the wall. Must be from when they cut the first hole for the first lightswitch, I thought. I flipped it over and noted there was a bit of brown paper, or wallpaper backing, obscuring what was underneath. I gently pulled it away.

Original wallpaper. Faintly art deco. The only down side is the piece is so small.

At least it’s better than what I found in the downstairs bathroom. The bathroom which is a DIY bad dream. The tileboard is installed sideways in there, and yes, you can tell. The floral sprays every other tile are certainly sideways. In one spot, since it goes up the wall halfway, I can pull on the edge a bit to reveal the wall underneath.

I kinda wished I hadn’t, for there was the wallpaper of the renovation before that. Brace yourself, it was probably from the late eighties, early nineties. It is hunter green and cream plaid.

I think we’ll leave that room for a while.

***

We will be off to Aunt Boo’s for the afternoon, so here’s hoping Uncle Leroy will give us lots of blog fodder. Or tomorrow I could tell the story of Grandma Betty. She’s not our grandma and her name’s not Betty, but there you have it.