The Day I Played Plumber's Assistant

Some of you saw my series of Tweets last Friday about the water going out at our house. The day before Amelia's birthday party, of course. Luckily we were planning a very small, low-key affair. And, luckily, since our plumber couldn't fix the problem, our fantastic neighbors bailed us out with a long hose and a hookup to their outside spigot.

To make a long story short, I turned the water on Friday morning to flush a drain I had poured some Drano down. When I came back 10 minutes later, there was no water running.

Uh oh.

This can't be good.

My first thought was that I wished I'd showered that morning instead of waiting for naptime. My second thought was that I should have done a couple more loads of laundry the night before. My third thought was that this was the perfect excuse for a less-than-perfectly-clean house for Amelia's party. There's always a silver lining!

The plumber (who was just here four days earlier to do some repair work, ironically) came and checked out the well pump. The two easy possibilities were bust, so he had to pull the pump to see if it was burned out. But he couldn't get it pulled by himself. It stuck in the pipe. He came in to tell me it would cost me an extra couple hundred to get someone out to help him.

Really? How hard could it be?

Fortunately, any idiot can hold the cord so if the pump breaks off it doesn't end up in the well. I told him to give me 10 minutes, threw all four kids in their beds for naptime and went out to play plumber's assistant. Even with my expert assistance, the pump stayed stuck.

At this point my neighbors came to the rescue and the plumber hooked things up so my neighbor's well would provide water to my house about 250 feet away. It worked like a charm -- just as good as having our own well functioning. Which is good, because I went through about a gallon of hand sanitizer Friday when we had no water, but that stuff only goes so far. Sometimes you just need soap and hot water.

We already have city water in our neighborhood, and Jeff and I had been talking about hooking up to it, so we decided that now was the time. The company we hired had everything hooked up by 10 a.m. Tuesday. We were amazed they got it done that quickly.

Turns out your hookup gets fast-tracked when you don't have any running water at your house. Another silver lining.

In the end, all is well that ends well. (No pun intended! The well still doesn't work.) It was a hassle, but a short-lived hassle. And, the cost of the water hookup is almost exactly equal to the amount of our federal tax refund. I guess that's lucky too, right?

© Trippin' Mama 2010