Friends are Great or New Water Main

Hey everyone,
I guess I should say"Happy New Year!" There is no better way to start the year out than to install a new water main from the street to the house. It took 3 days and $230.00. It would have been cheaper if I didn't buy a $28.00 hammer, but I'll get to that in a minute...

This picture above shows some of the new foundation piers I've been building. They are real deep in the ground (about 4 feet each). While I was crawling around I noticed that some of the ground at the far side of the house was packed like beach sand. I started digging it up to find a broken water pipe (the Main) , which made me start laughing pretty hard, because now I knew how the tree growing out of the side wall of our house was doing so well. It was enjoying all water it could get.

The water drained to the front porch where it buckled the floor. I had to stop working on the foundion to take care of this problem or I wouldn't have been able to lift the house there for fear of it sinking more.

Friends are great and you know have real ones when they help you without your asking. My friends Gary and Jeff are fantastic. It would have been at least a week without water and I don't think you would want to be around me without a shower for 3 days nevermind a week.

The first day was kind of crazy. I started to dig around the water main shut-off switch but couldn't find the pipe. I thought the plumbing gods were against us. I called Gary to see if he knew something I didn't. After an hour of trying to find the water pipe, we gave up and dug our own. It turns out that whoever installed the old water main piped around the huge boulders seen in the picture above.

The old pipe came out at a 70 degree angle from the house, continued under the driveway, then doubled back to the water meter at a 90 degree angle. These boulders where huge. It took awhile, but we dug them out. As my friend Joe would Say "NICE!"

You always want to have a straight shot from the street to the house. No wonder our toilets weren't flushing that well.

The ground was hard and full of clay. The clay was sticking to our shovels. It took a couple of 10- hour days digging this trench. I recomend paying someone to do it. It's a real pain.

For the first day, Jeff and Gary helped dig the trench. The second day, Gary helped me install the new plumbing. He enjoys working on soldering the copper joints and I thank him. I was so tired, that he did most of that job. We had to install a new shut-off switch because the old one isn't made for connecting to copper.

As you can see from the picture, I had to dig under the house to get the right level.

We ran into some problems at the other end pipe. The old pipe had a lip on it, that connected to the main meter outside. Gary and I ran to the store a few times trying to see if we could buy
a piece of pipe that would fit the old pipe and weld it on. No one had one and to make the flange would cost too much money.

That's where my $28.00 hammer came into play. The guy at the hardware store up the street told us that we could use a hammer with a round edge on it to bang the top of the new pipe to get the flange we needed. After trying this twice and failing, we decided to clean up the old pipe and use it instead.

Before we did that we had to sit down and eat bread and peanut butter, the only thing we had at the time. With our stomachs half-full, we finished the job.

I thought I would post this picture down below as part of our music portion or lack thereof. My cousin-in-law is building the first ever BB guitar. See ya.