The Waterwork Saga at Happy Homestead!
I thought it was just a little water stream coming from a derelict house that is situated 10 feet away from our driveway. The house is locally known as “Springfields” - because it has a spring! It made sense. It was even kind of cute - our own private little waterfall!
That is until a neighbour, who is also a local plumber, paid us an unexpected visit advising that it is actually a live leak from a supply pipe delivering Scottish Water supply to our house. So nothing as romantic as a living natural stream, unfortunately.
That is until a neighbour, who is also a local plumber, paid us an unexpected visit advising that it is actually a live leak from a supply pipe delivering Scottish Water supply to our house. So nothing as romantic as a living natural stream, unfortunately.
And so the saga of digging begins. Shovels, rakes and sledge hammers all came out of their hiding holes. Also, the plumber lent us his pickaxe to smash through the billions of rocks and grit that the pipes seemed to be resting in, which we really couldn’t have done without. And so we dug - many times it felt like we’re in some real-life Minecraft episode (why does digging grit always look so easy in the game?!).
A couple of days of non-stop labour and we finally have the trench dug, the new pipe laid and the plumber back to connect the ends. He was not much impressed with out digging efforts, heavily implying that he had seen deeper, better laid pipes in his career - but hey, we’ve done it all by ourselves, so it felt like a small victory and we were proud of it. The pipe was laid and the plumber had drilled through the 3ft stone wall and did his magic (a trivial note - plumber was using the power socket in our utility room to power up his drill). All that was left for us to do is bury the pipe back up.
Now, remember the trivial note above - well, those were the sockets that our freezers had previously been plugged in and - I guess that in all that excitement of *finally* having completed this massive plumbing task I forgot to plug the power to the freezers back on! Yes, that actually happened… Luckily, I noticed my mistake the following day and no food was wasted - but I feel a definite lesson learned!