Murphy's Law and water lines

We have a crew with bull dozer out trying to level out a spot for my new workshop. We share a well with the neighbor but we weren't positive about where his water line was. The crew boss just called and said he had a guy running to town for some parts.

Timing was actually good since that same crew is running the water line from a commercial water tap that we and three of the neighbors just had put in so we needed to find the well line anyway. We are taking the neighbor off the well and running the commercial water to his house and teeing it on for another neighbor. He's an elderly gent and just has an old mobile home (land owned by the other neighbor) so it won't cost him anything.

At my place it was a poorly installed septic line...hit it at less than 18" below ground, should have been at 4'. And it was running uphill...Murphy was writing a lot of new laws that day.

In my town, after a seveer t-storm knocked down a utility pole downtown, the electric utility company crew just moved over a couple of feet, knocked a hole in the sidewalk and bored a new hole for the replacement pole. We've all seen this public service thing:



Evidently, the electric company thought it didn't apply to them and their drill auger bogged down just as it severed an underground main trunk telephone line and knocked out phone/fax service to nearly 10,000 customers across 1/2 the county for 2 days, including to 2 hospitals and the police and fire depts. Wire bundle was about 6" in diameter. That was a lot of twisted pairs to splice back together and weatherproof.

Brother-in-law had a fence put up, and his fence crew drilled a posthole right thru a 4' poly water main that some county contractor had buried just inside private property, and the whole community was without water for 2 days. Plats showed the line to be on the public easement--obviously it was not.

Pipes I can deal with...(maybe not a 4' one) but wires that have to be spliced or pulled and replaced are a lot of work. We hit a wire to our pool light once with a trencher, it looked like colorful confetti everywhere; but replacing it was not a party. We had completely forgotten about that wire until we found it. Why is it you can find them when you don't want them and can't find them when you need them? Is that Murphy again?

I was working for a utility construction company many years ago just outside Detroit trenching down about 12' deep. We hit one of the main phone trunk lines that wasn't shown on any drawings. It took them 3 days to get it all back together but I have no idea how many people lost service.

It will still be awhile before we actually get the shop built but this is at least a start. The dozer that found the water line was there to level out the little slope where the shop will be built. The "before" is more to the west than the current picture. The line of brush in the 2013 picture is basically a dump spot for construction debris that the previous owner used since the dump that was two miles away was too far I guess.

I have lost count of how many fires, dump runs and tons of brick/block has been used to fill in a ditch intended to fill a pond that wouldn't hold water.

The to-do list is still huge but getting smaller since we only have 5 or 6 days a month there to work on it. We hope to be there full time around October of this year.

So exciting!
Enjoying the progress updates and wow have you managed to do so much with the little time you have.
Beautiful land!

Thanks Southern - we have reached the point where every thing that gets done is a major change in the big picture. We had the dozer crew clean out a road through a patch of woods that we will use to lay water lines from the tap that just got installed. It also gives me access to an area about 500' x 200' that was so steep that I was afraid of turning my tractor over trying to cut it.

We have been carrying buckets from the well for over two years now for bathing/toilet/cleaning. One of the 1st things we did was re-do the plumbing and wiring but I didn't connect the water line from the well to the house since rural water was supposed to be there in May of 2013. The crew that got the contract on the extended water lines was from West Tennessee and they had no idea how hard it was to excavate our limestone that only lies about a foot or so under the surface.

We will install a frost free faucet down by the shop that will be near the future lean-to shelter for a lambing area.

OMG! As the kids say! I hate excavating for any work - you never know what will turn up. When we paved our driveway, the crew almost hit the gas line. We thought it came in from the front of the property but it turned out gas and electric feeds were from the road at the back - only water service was from the front. We knew about the electric servicesince we are at the end of the service line and were without power for over a week one time after a storm. The electric didn't even have our service in the right spot on their maps. They kept telling us it was fixed and we nearly froze to death! My husband works for the utility too but in another area! Finally he had to call them and tell them where to find the correct service feed. It turnesd out they had fixed everyone else's service but didn't know there was another pole!

Luckily we are on septic so we know where that is. After a bad storm season friend's husband drove their tractor into their tank because they thought it was 50 feet the other direction!

When we moved in here there was nothing except the house and a concrete block building down the hillside. I wanted to plant grass for my kids to play on. Our ground is so alkali that only nettles and chapparral grew naturally. When I started digging for flower beds, etc. we found that when the previous owner roofed the house he just threw all the roofing in the front yard. Since we are on a steep hillside he covered it up with dirt and it looked like there was more level space than there actually was. 10 pickup loads to the dump. We found where the old bathroom and kitchen tile was dumped in another location. 2 more pickup loads. Down the back steep hillside was the old burn dump filled with rusty cans, broken bottles, etc. In another spot we had to dig out buried chain link and wire fencing to put up goat pen fencing. All of it had to be carried up another steep hillside to be removed. Our dump is about 5 miles away.

We have 6 acres but only about 3/4 acre is flat or flattish. I wish we could use a tractor. Everything had to be hand carried up and out. Our land is heavy clay with layers of shale throughout. The old trash dump site we could handle since that was normal in farm areas. But it was sure a pain to have to crawl up and down that steep hillside filling cans with broken glass and metal to haul it off. We couldn't leave it there for the horses and livestock to step on. You know that once it was cleaned out they would never venture there, but if we left it they would all get cut and then we could add vet bills to the cleanup! LOL

Well, good luck with your projects. We are probably not the only ones who have been working on our property for 25 years and it is not finished yet. Of course, after that time you have to start all over again because everything has worn out! We only do it because we love it, right?

I think most of the folks on this forum know what it's like. It's nice to jaw on about things that are important to us but not even thought about by those that haven't done it.

I know, it is hard to talk to those people. They don't have a clue and no frame of reference either!