Snowed In and the Well Adventures!

The Pacific Northwest has a couple of strikes against it when it comes to winter weather. The first is that we’re right on Puget Sound here and thus the weather is fairly temperate so it’s really not too cold much of the time. We’re not used to lots of cold and snow and not very well equipped to clear it or deal with it. The other is that we have a lot of hills and mountains that make it hard to maneuver when it gets snowy and especially when it gets icy.

Add to the the fact I live in the sticks. We have a well, a private gravel road and a gravel driveway. I love my rural home and my privacy, don’t get me wrong, but it can be an issue on occasion. Like this week….

It started snowing here on Tuesday. By the time I got home, it was quite cold but not a ton of snow. However when I turned on the water, ominous things happened. The water flow was not normal and the pipes were making nasty sounds from having air in them. Not Good.

I text messaged Mr Maura and told him to get home because something was wrong with the well. He booked home about an hour later and we proceeded to don snow boots, winter coats and gloves and hats, grabbed flashlights and the machete and proceeded to hack our way through the overgrown blackberries and down to the wellhouse. We ended up fording the wetlands – and I can now say after being up to my ankles in ice water in them, the Land’s End Extreme Squall Boots ROCK. Finally we go to our destination….

What. A. Disaster.

Now our house was self-built by Old Man Interesting. When we bought it, the furnace was being controlled by a chicken coop timer. No Joke. The well-house is no better. Instead of a real pressure tank, he’d jury-rigged up an air injection system. Two valves of this had failed and sprayed the interior of the tiny wellhouse with water, causing one wall and the ceiling of the “regular” wallboard to soak and collapse onto the floor. The (OPEN) electrical had corroded and shorted out, depriving the well of power. Lack of power meant the heater wasn’t on and the pipes in the wellhouse had frozen (not burst, thank the Goddess).

For all my occasional issues with Mr. Maura, I’m incredibly glad he’s handy. And the Goddess was smiling on us, I think. After he temporarily repaired the electrical, he got the heater going and thawed the well house and its pipes. We got water back about 3 am on Tuesday. Because we’d run the water in the house for a bit, the air in the pipes kept them from freezing in the meantime.

Wednesday he braved the roads to get to the home repair store and picked up a new electrical panel, fittings to close off the air injection “system” and priced insulation and pressure tanks. I ended up text messaging him when it began hailing HARD at home and he almost missed a turn or two on the way home.

Right now we have water and we’re waiting for things to warm up before we really fix the electrical in the wellhouse. We don’t want to let it freeze or have issues trying to get it fixed so it has no heat again. In the spring we’ll put in a new pressure tank and re-insulate and wallboard the wellhouse. This time it will be done in concrete or blueboard though – like a WET environment should be.

In the meantime, we’re stuck at home unless we want to chain up. School has been closed for three days and the spawn has been home the whole time. As has Mr. Maura. I’m trying to get in some writing and they’re not helping. Now we have a storm warning for high winds tomorrow. Joy. We don’t need to lose power on top of the well issues..

Here are a couple of pictures of the backyard and my favorite Hawthorne tree. You can see the beautiful huge trees we’re surrounded by as well as the snow.

Wonder if I can come up with some interesting ideas based on snow storms……

Written by Maura Anderson

Maura began writing on a whim and writing male/male romance on a dare. She enjoyed the results so much that her muse can't seem to turn off the ideas and she continues to write stories about acceptance, being true to one's self and love.
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Tags: Maura Anderson, snow