Our water is back!!!

Sorry it's taken me so long to get back on and update this. I wanted to post pictures of the adventure but I can only do that from Paul's computer and with him on it all of the time it's a little hard to snag some time. So we got our water back on Tuesday. Thank you for everyone who kindly offered their help. If we would have been out a little longer I certainly would have taken you all up on the shower offers... but I probably would have had a hard time letting you all see me as bad as I feel I looked. Monday night I couldn't take it anymore and I filled a pot up in the bathtub and managed to get just enough water to boil and wash my hair. I know that sounds super vain but it really felt good.

So Monday night we finally got a hold of a plumber and scheduled a time for him to come Tuesday. Well on Tuesday morning we woke up and called the lady who takes care of the water for our subdivision and told her that we were going to be working on the pipes and wanted to give her a heads up incase something went wrong (they had an emergency a couple of weeks ago when a pipe broke in our subdivisions main line and they had to shut off water to everyone so we didn't want it to happen again). She came by and told us that we had to have the certified technition come by and shut off the line that ran to our house and so we decided to wait until he got there. The plumber showed up around 11 am and we kind of explained the situation. After he got here we all started checking the property line to see if we could find the pipe head that ran off the main line to our property. On most houses in our area that pipe head sits at a corner at the property perimeter... like everything else at our house, things aren't the way they should be. Ours apparently sits in our rock bed by our driveway. It took us about a half hour to find it. We didn't know it was something we had to maintain so finding it was a little hard because our rock bed looked like this...


Please tell me if you would be able to find a pipe head in that?!!! Well, we got luck when the plumber's wife just happened to step on it. Once we uncovered it we noticed that the cap had been broken of a long time ago, this is a big problem. We had to drop a pole down the pipe to turn the valve that shut the water off... but we found that there were rocks, mud, and debris down the pipe so we had to clear it all out before we could make any progress. The plumber left at this point to another job and told us to call when we were done. Paul and the pump tech worked on clearing the pipe. We had to start by digging it up...




As we were working our tech got the idea to shop-vac the rocks out instead of digging up the whole pipe so he and Paul got working on that while Riann and I went in to eat. Finally after another half hour they had it clear and the water was off. Once that was done we called the plumber back to finish the job here at the house. The problem we had to have him here for was the valve on the emergency shut off under the house was so old that when we tried to turn off the water the valve broke and we had no control of our water pressure. Once we got the stuff inside the house done we ran out to Ace to get some new pipe and a cap to finish the pipe outside. Now that we knew we had to maintain it we raised the pipe by about a foot and put the cap on it so we wouldn't have rocks back down it again. Here is how that happened and how it looks now...









After a long endeavor we're thankful it's done.