I’d felt like shit all week and then Biden took an intellectual (or rather an anti-intellectual) dump on my TV which really bummed me out. I needed a break in the cycle of suck. Also, all this negativity had me crapped out with the squirrels. I’d been making progress with the squirrel story but lately I’ve been doing naught but treading water.
It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness so I decided to take a “mini-vacation”. A chance to rest, do no homestead chores whatsoever, and maybe get my groove back with the squirrels. It was a spur of the moment weekend morning idea but why the hell not? My plan was to drive several hours to a city of no particular interest and spend the night at a hotel that’s nobody’s idea of a destination resort. I’d maybe walk the dog inside a Cabela’s store. (It’s always fun to do an indoor dog walk.) Possibly I’d get some sushi. The next day I’d hammer a few thousand words of squirrel at a coffee shop and go home. It’s not a beach in Tahiti but even the lamest of vacations is better than nothing.
It’s surprising how quickly I perked up. I started having visions of an indoor shooting range. Mrs. Curmudgeon was on board with that! She started a web-search to see if one was available.
While she was Googling, I jammed a toothbrush and a handful of wadded clothes into a bag. I tossed it in the car. While I was there I might as well grab some junk that was cluttering the car. I decided to put the junk in the basement.
I walked to the basement and found an inch of water on the floor. BAM! My simple little plans took a headshot!
Adulting sucks.
Every hope, dream, positive vibe, and spring in my step evaporated. Game over man!
I alerted Mrs. Curmudgeon that there was a leak, that the mini-vacation was canceled, and also that life was a useless slog of misery. (I was not a happy camper.)
Now there are plumbing issues and there are plumbing ISSUES. This was definitely on the minor side of the spectrum. For one thing it’s an unfinished basement so the leak was spraying water on concrete. Technically, nothing was damaged… yet. My pissing and moaning was because I had things I’d rather do than standing on a ladder getting sprayed with funky water. Who doesn’t?
Unlike the dickheads in politics, I can’t talk problems out of existence. (They can’t either but they sure try.) When plumbing gives out I must drop everything until it’s fixed. There’s nobody else who’ll handle it for me. I’ve no landlord, authority figure, God, or roll of the dice that will heal a busted pipe without blowing a hole in my day. In particular, living in East Bumfuck nowhere meant I can’t easily call a plumber.
It was my job and mine alone. It’s just my “white male privilege” manifesting itself. Lucky me!
Lets start by saying this isn’t my first rodeo. My house, when I bought it, had barely functional plumbing. It froze often and catastrophically. I patched and replaced and rebuilt and insulated and fixed until it was much better. It does what it needs to do and it’s even reliable (well at least I thought so before the leak disabused me of that notion). I suppose the plumbing is “good enough for some definition of good” and today’s definition of “good enough” had stochastically failed. The long-term alternative is to tear everything out and replace it all, including the hard stuff behind drywall and in crawl spaces; an approach that’s prohibitively labor intensive and expensive.
This particular leak wasn’t rocket science. It was visible, obvious, and near a similar situation I’d battled about 15 years ago. There was a fair chance I’d fix it myself with minimal drama. But I’m no fool… I wouldn’t bet on an easy fix.
I live in reality. As a plumber, I am barely adequate. I know that. We are all human. Nobody can do everything. Unless it’s stupid simple, I’ll fix things temporarily and let the guys with professionally certified ass cracks handle the permanent situation.
We wisely decided on a two prong approach. Mrs. Curmudgeon grabbed the phone and started getting rejected by every plumber in the time zone. Simultaneously, I grabbed a wrench and started getting wet. In theory, either her phone calls or my struggles would work out. I doubted she’d get anyone on the phone. It feels like the last plumber in the county retired a decade ago.
Without going down a plumbing rabbit hole, the problem was the flexible hose that leaves my well pump and goes to my pressure tank. (Technically what I call “flexible hose” is “plastic pipe”. It’s the kind of shit that comes on big reels, is 1” diameter, and is not really flexible at all. I hate the stuff!)
Back in the day, that hose split causing a 1” pressurized hose blast from hell to flood the basement big time. At the time I didn’t have a way to drain the basement. I shut off the flow from the well pump, begged a handyman for help (not a plumber because those hardly exist), and we spent days unfucking the situation. $3500 later it was fixed.
We fixed it right, or as right as we could. After mucking out a billion gallons of water with an array of pumps I set out to make sure I’d never need to do it again. The solution included hammering a hole in my concrete floor! The handyman and I sunk a receptacle the size of a 5 gallon bucket below floor level and cemented it in place.
If you’ve never took a pickaxe and shovel to the concrete floor of a skeevy basement your life is good and you should offer thanks to the Gods of Plumbing. If you’ve never hauled endless 5 gallon buckets of rock and concrete up basement stairs you’ve no idea how much life can suck! It was exhausting and I never want to do it again.
Take my word for this, if some horror movie plot left a murder victim cemented under your floor… just leave it there!
Into this hard won “pit”, we installed a sump pump with float valve. Later I had an electrician wire a special circuit just for that pump. It’s plumbed to evacuate water into the septic system, complete with check valves that, should they fail and siphon from the septic, I’m going to move.
Since building that sturdy (and expensive) backup, I’ve never needed it. This particular leak had soaked everything in the vicinity like a mist irrigation system gone rogue. But it was still only a few inches deep and hadn’t flowed to the sump pump yet.
As for the flexible hose, it emerges from underneath one of my sketchier crawl spaces. Some parts of my house are well over 100 years old. Actually, my house isn’t really a single house at all. What I mean is it grew. When the farm family that lived in it popped out another kid or two, they built more space. They did that for nearly a century. I live in a mishmash of random unplanned additions glued to a decrepit core.
In case you’re wondering, the core pre-dates both indoor plumbing and electricity.
I don’t like where that hose comes from! I’d like to replace it. Unfortunately, someone in the 1970’s saw fit to build a floor directly over it. Short of taking a chainsaw to my laundry room floor there’s only so much I can do. The best solution I could come up with (15 years ago) was to cut the hose (pipe) at the failure point. From there I crammed a nipple (friction fit one side and male threads the other), added a valve (female both sides), and installed a second nipple on the other side to rejoin the undamaged portion of the hose (pipe) that goes to the pressure tank. It’s an ugly solution but it is what it is.
It worked fine right until it didn’t. I’m glad. I didn’t have many other options without hurling a bank loan at it. Such are the compromises between practicality (“it’s weird but it works”) and Utopian ideals (“nuke it from space and build a house that isn’t crap”) that rural folks (especially broke ones) have to face. I swear, half of our nation’s political divide is between people who’ve installed a “Sharkbite” fitting into a crappy old broken pipe and those who’d wave an entirely new plumbing system into being in their mind but never made a fitting water tight in physical reality.
Danger Will Rogers! Mid-stream bitch session to ensue!
As an aside, I once had a discussion with an urban dweller about how I don’t pay water OR septic bills. I explained that I maintain a well and pump and pressure tank and all the assorted things. I am literally my own independent water supply. The labor and capital to do this is all my burden. Regardless, he thought it was somehow “unfair” that he has a water bill and I don’t.
After that the conversation turned to “sewer bills”. I tried to explain my entirely privately financed independent owned septic tank and leach field. I think the guy had nightmares. He assumed that every dump taken by every human in every house in every nation is always piped to a municipal treatment plant. I explained that “leach field” and “treatment facility” are similar or related technology but it did no good. Municipalities are special because they employ magic elves which use the power of government to turn shit into rainbows.
What’s worse is that the fact that I live miles and miles from the nearest treatment plant. That true fact just didn’t fit with his world view. Nobody can run twenty or forty miles of pipe from just one house! If you live miles from the nearest town, your morning shit can’t be piped to an urban treatment at the crap spa.
(I once met a person who couldn’t drive at night where there were no streetlights… same thing.)
I tried to explain that’s just how it is. Many things can’t exist in a low population density. Many things are not provided to hinterland people. I can’t have light rail or subway service. There are no street lights. I haul my own garbage, pump my own water, and treat my own sewage. (He’d have a stroke if he knew I cut my own firewood and that I use FIRE as a form of heat.) Heck, I can’t even get pizza delivered.
The analogy never took hold. He refused all my explanations. His opinion is that I ought to pay for services like he does and it’s somehow immoral to simply provide them myself. If I can’t use a city bus that can’t come to my house I still ought to pay.
Sigh…
In his mind it was somehow “unfair” he had monthly bills. When I dropped ten large on a new septic tank and paid for the whole fucking thing in one shot that didn’t mean anything. It didn’t count, for reasons that aren’t clear. The gulf between urban and rural is larger than either side fully understands.
Back to today’s story, I was carefully remembering the last time this hose (pipe) broke. It was a stone cold bitch to insert the friction fit into the hose. I remember a big struggle.
I killed the power to the well pump and depressurized my house’s pipes. But the little pinhole leak was still pressurized and spraying. I closed the valve to isolate it from the pressure tank input. I don’t think that’s how pressure tanks work (I don’t even know if the valve I installed 15 years ago made sense. I just tend to prefer valves to avoid “there’s nothing I can do other than let it leak” locations.) At least it stopped spraying me in the face.
In the meantime, Mrs. Curmudgeon had gotten nowhere finding a plumber. Nobody would even answer the phone on a weekend. I shouted upstairs that the water was off. Just then I heard the toilet flush.
“I hope it was worth it, that’s the last one.” I thought.
There’s more to follow but it might not go live for a few days… After the plumbing event, I decided to run away and go camping. I’ll be back when I get back. See ya’ then…