Tuesday, December 20, 2005

What Can Go Wrong...Will Go Wrong.

Mike moved in as of Saturday. I brought up a few boxes of household "basics" to get us started, and he and Gary got the spare room bedroom furniture out of storage. Todd was still working inside until Saturday afternoon. After arranging things and a quick trip into town, we headed over to Cliff & Elaine's Christmas party. There was a great spread of food, and we met some nice people, but we turned into pumpkins early, as Mike had been up since the previous night, and I'd only slept for four hours on Friday night.

Sunday we fired up the woodstove, and once we got a decent ash base built up, it burned beautifully.

Sunday night we discovered there was no hot water when Mike turned the shower on. At the same time, we discovered that the shower drain trap was frozen solid. Monday morning, we had no water at all. Mike went out to the wellhouse to investigate, and found a geyser inside. He shut that down and eventually determined that the pipes under the house were frozen, supposedly because we used the woodstove instead of furnace and there being no warmth under the floor from the forced air heating...soooo...Todd spent the day under the house installing some vents underfloor from the furnace, and we think we'll be fine with the woodstove if we use the circulating fan on the furnace to circulate the warmth. Growing pains. Oh, and we got a new element in the water heater too. The gas guy arrived during the morning and announced the furnace needed adjusting, based on tests the previous week. Butch the pump guy turned up to investigate the Old Faithful incident in the wellhouse, which turned out to be related to the frozen pipes.

Telus arrived yesterday morning and announced that the teleduct underground couldn't be used and promptly disappeared. They eventually came back and laid a line on the ground that can be buried in the spring.

We have water, heat, electricity and telephone. It's almost civilized.

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