Home Work: Day 4 of 6 (Demolition and Well, Well, Well)

With the rain on Wednesday, we couldn’t do the well work and the rain continued into Thursday morning. So in the AM, I continued the interior demolition work. I began breaking through into the back bedroom which has proven to be really tough work. The was the exterior wall of the original house and they simply added layers of material on top of the wood planks that all needed to be pried off, one layer at a time. Then, the planks themselves are both super sturdy and well attached. It’s exhausting and slow work.

The actual exterior wall on the back of the house was no better. First, there was a similar effort to simply add layers over time. Second, they sandwiched  a whole bunch of fiberglass insulation in between an exterior plywood layer and an interior drywall layer. Clearly, they didn’t understand how insulation works – in requires airspace and padding to keep a layer of warmer air as a barrier between temperatures. Flattening the bulky insulation makes it entirely ineffective. And, better still, there was an entire four inch wall cavity where the insulation SHOULD have been left empty. Complete incompetence.

As the morning progressed, the sky cleared and the day warmed nicely. Despite the morning rain, and the previous three days of cold and damp, Thursday turned out to be a beautiful, sunny, and warm day. (Too bad Friday and Saturday don’t appear to follow suit.) Around 5:30, Bill came up the road pushing this set of tanks on a dolly. The tanks are acetylene and oxygen – an acetylene torch. With the bolts in the well cap rusted and stripped, torching them off was the best option. I’m, again, so thankful to have a neighbor like this, because I’d have already called in a contractor to do this work at a cost of around $5,000. Instead, he’ll help me get this done for less than half of that.

Bill got into the ditch and, before firing up the torch, jokingly asked if I had insurance on the house. Jokes aside, he fired up the torch and began cutting the bolts. As he cut, sparks flew like a July 4th sparkler from the rust. Then, as the rust was removed, the bolts would turn to slag – white hot metal. Bill would then pound them with a hammer, and, POP – off came the bolt tops. In about five minutes we were done torching and the cap as removed.

Now it was time to pull the pump. Bill borrowed this homemade contraption from a friend – it has a collar that fits right over the well casing, and a slanted arm holding an old car wheel. As we pulled up the pipe, wiring, and pump, Bill fed this over the wheel and I walked west up a small hill to a service road pulling the pipe up and out of the well. It wasn’t easy to pull, and I had the full weight on me, but with this contraption it was much easier. Without it, one guy would lift the pipe vertically about 4-6 feet while the other walked it out. One section at a time. Instead, I was able to keep walking, slowly, but steadily, until we pulled the pump out of the well.

Here’s the pump once we got it out. The pump itself is about 4′ tall with mesh sections to create suction and push the water up the pipe. It’s only a 1/2 horsepower pump, but submerged in water and inside a small well casing, physics does the work and it easily pushes water up the 100-ish feet from the well to the house. The brown much you see shouldn’t be there, and the bottom of the pump had rotted out completely. This was likely the result of non-use, although the pump also seemed old enough (30-years?) that a failure was inevitable.

The last step before shopping for new materials was to take measurements. Bill used a 200′ tape measure and attached a heavy wrench to it with twist ties. The wrench assured a solid weight to dangle into the well and so we’d hear it when it was hitting the metal casing above the water level and when it hit the water. From the top of the casing, we measured 39′ to the top of the water level and then 115′ to the bottom of the well. That’s a pretty healthy water table, and Bill reminded me that we’d had a lot of rain. But even +/-20′ and we’d be in decent shape. So, we don’t need a new well, just a new pump. And the well depth is very opportunistic (probably by design) since a roll of pipe comes in 100′ lengths. Ideally the bottom of the pump is about 5′ feet from the bottom of the well to prevent stirring up much and creating turbid water. In my case, it’ll be about 11′ up, but with plenty of water above and no need to get additional piping.

Tomorrow we shop for all the replacement materials and MAYBE get this installed on Saturday if the weather holds!