Beginning our project

DIY Doctor

It wasn’t exactly my idea to fix up the house. I’m a man, and therefore a minimalist. We knew we were going to move, and we knew the prices of land and property had inflated in the thirteen years we had lived in our home. So it was my plan to sell it in the piece of junk state it was in. We’d reared a passel of kids there, and the broken windows, cramped kitchen, holes in walls, hammered cabinets, stained carpets, dingy linoleum, peeling paint, garage door it took Hercules, or at least a Herculean effort to open, bathroom doorways so small my wife and I could not pass each other in the door frame at the same time, heaters that had not worked since we lived there, a woodstove downstairs that smoked so badly we had only used it once, an upstairs woodstove that worked admirably well, but was set in front of a wall of thick, hideous lava rock that shrunk the room by six inches and made it seem like a cave, a master bedroom that fit a king size bed but little else, light switches, bathroom fan, holey doors, (note the spelling, which means “doors with large holes” caused by child who had just slugged sibling and fled to bedroom, locking the door, with sibling close behind, wearing fire-hardened leather boots and enough anger to kick with sufficient force to overcome the integrity of the Masonite and glue bedroom door) and our weed farm outside, were just going to be part of the package we sold, hoping someone was desperate enough to buy it “as is.” (Do you realize that was a 209 word sentence?)
My wife had other ideas. “Look at the Granger’s [name changed so I don’t have to ask their permission to use it] house,” she said. They’ve been trying to sell it for a year, and it’s not as junky as ours.”
“Right, but–” It’s not that I didn’t say any more, it’s just that what I said was irrelevant. Mostly when I protest my wife’s arguments, it’s irrelevant. I know it and she certainly knows it, but I still do it.
“So, shall we take out the staircase and move it somewhere? It kind of disrupts the hallway downstairs.” When I make up my mind to do something, I tend to get grandiose.
With great indulgence, Velinda entertained the idea with me. Two days later, we had a feasible plan, although we didn’t explain what we would do for a staircase while the new one was under construction. I expended a lot of effort convincing Velinda that it was doable, and even more converting her to the idea.
In the end, it was I that abandoned the plan, just after Velinda became convinced. I curse myself now for my foolishness in bringing it up, because once she has something in her mind, I have to act like a spoiled child, screaming (I never quite fell to the level of pounding my fists on the floor) “I don’t care what you say! I’m just not going to do it!”
It works, but for those of you who understand the delicate balance of give and take in a marriage, you might see how it would decrease my good boy points down to negative two hundred or so. For those of you who don’t understand the balance, I will tell you: those points are not easy to retrieve.
So we began. I was in penance, which essentially rendered me helpless. Therefore, (and from there on out) Velinda told me what to do. “We’ll start with the kitchen.”
But before I go there, I have to tell you about our major preliminary project and expense. Six months before we began our rebuilding, our well failed. It had been acting up for several weeks before it actually went, with wide varying of pressure, including frequent periods of nothing. In the process of trying to diagnose it, I asked the opinion of many experts, and replaced the check valve, the pressure switch, the pressure tank and all the fittings, from the inlet coupling to the emergency shut off valve.
At risk of becoming too technical, and talking over my head, I’ll try to explain my rationale. A deep water well, (ours went down 175 feet) usually has a submergible pump that permanently operates down in the hole, twenty to fifty feet from the bottom. Wires from the main electrical switch box, on a 220 volt circuit, go down to the pump, which runs continuously unless someone or something turns it off. This is generally not desirable, because the pump unchecked will run the pressures up to 100 pounds per square inch, depending on the pump. This usually is too strong for an ordinary house’s plumbing fixtures, which like pressures no greater than 50 psi. 100 psi will cause leaks to spring out everywhere. As a rule, that’s bad. If someone took a shower in a stream of water under that pressure, he or she might be able to bore a hole in their back. Generally, that’s not good.
Enter the pressure switch. This is wired to the pump, and has a sensor that can be set to the pressure desired in the house. When the pressure is around 40 to 50 psi, the pressure switch kicks off the pump, and only allows it to turn back on when the pressure falls below 35, depending on the setting. If the pressure switch goes out, either the house will have the full pressure capacity of the pump, or none at all. Most definitely, none at all is not desirable.
The check valve allows the water to flow in only one direction: away from the pump. It keeps the water pressure built up in the house from flowing backward into the pump. (Later I discovered that the inside check valve is unnecessary, but I’ll get to that later)
The pressure tank sits either in the pump house or in the home, depending on the exit point of the water pipe from the well. More on that later too. It holds between 30 and 50 gallons usually, and maintains the water pressure evenly. It has a bladder inside it that maintains pressure even when the pump is off. It serves as a buffer between the pump and the house, and provides a store of emergency water in cases (hopefully rare) when the electricity goes out and the pump doesn’t run.
None of my interventions did a lick of good. A week after I replaced the pressure switch and the pressure tank my pump quit working– for good. Experts told me the pump had “sanded up” or burnt out, neither of which was good. I needed either to have my pump “blown out” or replaced, incurring a cost of between 2000 and 3000 dollars, depending on the problem. (a pump that only needed cleaning, or a pump that needed replacing)
At this point, Velinda and I made our first rash decision. Our water had been tasting like rotten eggs for some time, almost our entire time in the house, so we weren’t terribly keen about reestablishing a stinky water supply. We decided to spend two or three times more than the cost of installing a new pump, and dig a new well.
I’ll tell about it in a little while. My hands are tired right now, especially my forefingers. Stay tuned.