Well, Well, Well…

The last week seemed like an endless sentence of pain, punctuated by well problems.

We discovered our well pump is great until we get a rainfall of more than an inch. Then it quits working. 10 months per year that would not be a problem. But we are in the middle of monsoon season, so the well pump quits working about every 2-3 days!

We discovered this inconvenient behavior early in the week and called our builder. Since the pump guy was out of state at the time, our builder came over and diagnosed the problem with the pump guy over the phone. The problem was a faulty transducer.

When I asked what the transducer does, he informed me it replaces those old fashioned pressure switches.

My follow up question was: “What is wrong with those old fashioned pressure switches?”

Our builder replied: “The new transducers are really cool because they can talk to your smart phone”.

“I don’t care if my well pump can talk to my smart phone. I do care that it can pump water, even when it is raining.”, I responded.

To make a long story short, the builder showed me how to reset the transducer to get the well going again. That proved to be a very short-lived fix because on Saturday we got about an 1 1/2 inches of rain and the pump quit working again and no matter how many times I reset the transducer, it did not start transducing again.

Finally, on Sunday morning the pump guy showed up and replaced the transducer with an old fashioned pressure switch. Then, to make the builder happy, he spent a couple of hours screwing around with the control box to make the pressure switch talk to my smart phone. It gives me such great comfort knowing that next week, when I am in Columbus, OH, I will be able to determine if Tina went to M.T. Acres and flushed the toilet from my cell phone.

On our part of the build…

When the builder framed the house he put two access panels into the attic, one in the garage and one in the laundry room. The panels are typical of most houses where I just had to put a frame and moulding around the hole and a piece of the sheetrock from the ceiling would sit on the frame.

We were both plenty happy with that arrangement, but unfortunately the building inspector was not. He insisted that we have a spring-loaded trap door with a folding ladder in the garage.

So after enlarging the hole in the garage ceiling, my plan was to screw two braces to the rafters to hold the door in place while I screwed a few sheetrock screws to hold the door temporarily in place. Then Tina could remove the braces from below and open the door and I could climb out of the attic and bolt the door permanently in place.

It was a good plan that went awry during implementation. I put the door up in the attic and climbed up after it. Tina was below on the ladder helping me to get it into place when the back of the door slipped off one of the braces and the door came down right on her head nearly knocking her out.

Of course, I did not see any of this because I was up in the attic.

She toughed it out and we were able to get the door installed.

But the lesson for you youngsters is: When you finally meet the girl of your dreams and convince her to marry you, do not hit her in the head with a 40 pound door. That may work in caveman movies but not so much in real life.

We also undertook doing the epoxy on the garage and laundry room floors. The first step was to wet sand the entire floor. Then once the water dried, Tina scrubbed the entire surface with a broom to loosen up the dust from sanding. Then she was able to go over it with a shop vac to remove the dust. She did that twice. Finally, she mopped it with a microfibre mop and denatured alcohol.