The snow we had the next day. New Well cover to the right... can see the old one in the back.
I looked at the outside thermometer just now.... a rousing 15.7° F, not including the wind chill.
We have around 3" of crusty ice around the place, and the streets are quite the skating rink. People who live with this every winter would just laugh at how pathetic the drivers are.... 4WD Subarus, with chains, doing 10 MPH on clear dry pavement. Piles of broken chains, frozen to the free way. Other wonder drivers with their chains thrashing the wheel wells of their cars......... We're supposed to get another weather front through the area tomorrow, and the weather is predicted to crawl just above freezing for that event. Lovely. Can you say "Freezing Rain"? I knew you could.
The last two week's projects were to prepare for this blast of cold (which hit on this last weekend). I started out Saturday (6 Dec) by walking out to my pump house to turn on the thermostatically controlled light bulb, and add some bleach to the well at roughly 10 AM. No big deal, pull off the cover, swap out the old bulb for a new one, pull a bolt from the well housing, and pour some bleach through a funnel into the hole. An hour, tops.
Except, when I grabbed the roof of the pump house enclosure, it fell apart in my hands. Particle board. Exposed to rain. Tissue paper. No roof. Not really any walls to mention, either, as the box that had been placed over the well sat on bare earth, and the moisture had dissolved the lower edges of the side walls as well. (This is what happens, when the parties working on stuff have no direct stake in the matter… shoddy workmanship.)
Had to tip the whole thing over, and examine what was left, and what I could do about it before the predicted rains and snow arrived that evening. Fortunately, I discovered the well had in fact been built with a proper cinderblock casing, that goes down into the ground at least four courses.
I found this out by bailing out the opening with a coffee can, laying on my belly….. Someone had crashed into the well housing at some undetermined point in the past, and broken the cinderblock. That allowed the mice to move in, and the gophers. They had been using the well housing as their ‘Fortress of Solitude’, for a very long time. The entire interior of the well casing was filled with finely tilled earth…. This is where the term ‘tilth’ comes from. (I think that translates to rat droppings mixed with dirt. Smelly stuff.) More than 50 lbs of this ‘tilth’ were removed by hand. Tilth may be good for plants…… it’s really filth, by another name.
Once I had the hole excavated and a packed 6” thick gravel floor in place, I could make a wild guess as to what materials were needed to construct a new well housing, and make the mad dash to town to buy supplies and set to work. Of course, this took well over 2 hours to arrive at this point………
I decided I had to patch the cinderblock, then build a structure on that cinderblock so it would not rot in the future. That meant I needed concrete, pressure treated lumber, pressure treated plywood, roofing materials, some cinderblocks, all the various screws and nails, etc……..
Home Depot, here we come. Round trip 10 miles into town, shopping and returning took two more hours…. The light is starting to go, and the rains are still coming……… Next thing you know, I have the van parked with the headlights shining into the hole, and I have the Echo parked at right angles to that, with it’s lights shining in there, too.
5 hours later, I have a watertight, weather proof ½ half box (think right triangle, with the sloped face being the ‘roof’, with shingles. The holes are all sealed, and the next day I got to add 2” thick Styrofoam sheathing for insulation.
The bleach I added to the well? I got a little over zealous with that…….. took almost a week before you could not taste the bleach any more. But no more tilth. R
This is only one of the many trees down around the farm. This whole weekend was spent trying to get as much of this tree cut up and cleared. It will take us at least a couple of weekends to get this one dealt with. Numerous others still clean up.
DS splitting the rounds into usable firewood sized pieces. Is the only tree on the place like it, would say it is a medium hard wood. Very, very nice wood with a straight grain. Normally I know my tree species, almost say it is a Willow cultivar...but I am going to have to look this one up.
The mess of downed limbs.
Trunk area near the root ball. Multi trunk and it is hard to show just how large it is.
