Plumbing and Trenching.

Bit of a time crunch, but we got it done (enough) in plenty of time, at least two hours to spare.

Saturday morning, bright and early at the Home Depot when they opened at six, Ryan made the decision to save over a hundred dollars by switching to 3/4″ PEX instead of the 1″ PEX we had planned. Since the entire rest of the farm is plumbed in 3/4″ pipe, it doesn’t make sense to spend the extra money to run 1″ from the water tank to the existing line.

The push connector makes getting the junction together inside this little valve a lot easier, but still needed to get creative to get the crimper inside there at the correct angle.

I never claimed to be a plumber. It didn’t leak, though (thank God!) the whole time we were up at Swiss Kid’s Kamp on Saturday and Sunday. So that left us Monday morning to run the pipe through the conduit and bury it before the slaughter truck arrived and had to drive over it to get to the pig pen.

Then Uncle Adam had a good idea and wanted to re-work the plan (at 5 AM). He reasoned that we had enough spare PEX pipe to run two lines, and if we ran those at the bottom of the trench. That way we could use one of the lines to pump water from the well (if we ever get one up and running) into the tank, and the other line to run water out of the tank to the rest of the outside.

But stay with me, if we use screened dirt to bury them, then they don’t need conduit. Then we can bury the conduit a foot higher up in the trench to keep it up to code, and then we could pull a wire through it if we ever decide to run electricity out there.

Love it when a plan comes together. At the last minute. So we screened dirt to bury the water line, and Adam ran 550 cord through the conduit to make a pull line (we will attach it to wire and pull it through in a year or ten, if we feel like it).

After breakfast, more screening to get the water lines buried up to the corner of the shop, and then we put the coduit together. It was misting and drizzling, but I don’t know that it ever reached a level that could properly be called “rain.”

Little Man certainly didn’t mind working in it.

Just enough to dampen the top layer of spoil, 1/4″ down it’s pure dust and rock.

Daddy found this thing in the rock pile last summer while cutting blackberries. He remembered it today and was able to find it again.

Ellie’s photography. She didn’t want to move out of the barn door into the drizzle to get a better angle. So she used the zoom.

That’ll do to cover the valve box, so no one accidentally drives on it and crushes it. I imagine it will keep the kids out of it for a year or two as well.

And just like that…

We have a driveway again.