Today, Scott got the cistern back into its hole!

After digging it out with the excavator, he had to tarp it for a week while he worked his job. He successfully kept it dry through a torrential storm. Today he ordered gravel and tamped a few inches down at the bottom of the hole. Then he used a winch, ropes, trees, and his truck to scooch the cistern toward the hole and lower it down.

Here it is in front of the house where you can get a better appreciation for its scale.

Here are pictures of the progress getting the cistern back into the  hole. Oh, Scott cleaned the inside of the cistern out well last week and today I went in and sprayed it down with bleach and wiped it down.

I came out and worked for about 3 hours while Scott was working on the cistern. I cleaned up the inside and organized his tools. Of course, I made a fire and burned wood cutoffs and brush that had fallen around the yard. 

Over the winter, the cistern rose out of the ground. One pipe broke there, but no other plumbing seems damaged. (Incidentally, the guy who delivers the water said this happens "all the time," and to avoid it the most important thing is to keep the cistern full of water.)

It's been much too wet in the hole to do anything about it all summer. But recently, the weather has been dry, and it finally seemed a good time to get the cistern back underground.

Scott went out one day and used the shovel to move as much dirt off the cistern as he could. The next day he drove the excavator he had rented out to the property and managed to use it to pull the cistern out of the hole. He said it pushed the excavator to the limit. 

After getting the cistern out, he moved it out of the way and on to its side. He used the excavator to dig the hole deeper.

The cistern has gotten very dirty on the inside, unfortunately, and it must be cleaned before it goes back into the ground. A bit harder to do with no running water!

Scott finished his fall season and headed out to work on the river house. He first worked by himself for two days and then he and Frank worked for three, and now the plumbing is connected and the house has running water!

In the first two days, Scott finished the pump house (except the siding)—installing a platform for the pump, drywalling, and painting. He also bought and set in a new water heater. Then he moved the pump from the second floor to the pump house. He had to move some plumbing to accommodate the pump's new location, and he ran electricity out and installed a light and 110 and 220 outlets. ​

Scott is building a new house in which to place the water pump and the water heater.

Update 11/10/2024: Scott shingled it and put Tyvek on it. ​

Update 11/14/2024: Scott put the door on and built some concrete pillars around the wood support posts.

Scott and Frank spent one weekend working on tying the cistern into the pump. They discovered the pump had a failing gasket and wasn't strong enough to work from the second floor. So they'll be moving it to the ground level next and making a new gasket.

The next weekend, Scott spent a day and a half moving dirt again. Everything that he'd dug out for the cistern hole was piled up around it, and the resultant grading would have sent rainwater streaming toward the cistern cap. 

This is a before picture, but it's hard to tell from it how much dirt there was. Think: a day and a half's worth of shoveling.

Two places where some of the dirt went are one, around the firepit, and, two, over the former patio of tiles on the side of the house. Scott moved all the limestone that was under the tiles as well.

The plywood contraption by the window is our shower stall. Scott needs help moving it into the house so it's there until he has someone there.

Somewhere in the last couple of weeks, Scott installed the upstairs potty. 

Here are all the pictures so any can be enlarged.

Scott spent the weekend putting in the plumbing. Today, he did more and tied the drains into the septic system.

And he took a picture of the river at sunset.

On Saturday, 9/14/2024, Scott and I went out the river house. While he continued to dig the cistern hole, I kept filling the dumpster. 

I started with the pile of roofing. OMG shingles are a PIA. I had to peel them off the ground and each other, put them in the wheelbarrow, take them back out of the wheelbarrow bits at a time, and throw them into the dumpster. Mind you, I was loading the dumpster strategically to minimize voids and maximize the volume we got in there. 

In addition to shingles, wood and metal were mixed throughout the pile. Any wood that didn't have shingles stuck to it I burned. Other bits had to be carted to the dumpster. 

Okay, then there were BRICKS in the pile. So those got carted into the dumpster, too. Once I was done with that pile, Scott said I "could" move any other red bricks, pavers, or stones if I "wanted to." Challenge accepted. That included about 100 pavers from a patio that had to be lifted up, a load of bricks and concrete pavers from a decorative well of some sort, a stash of bricks on the side of the house, and the bricks that lined the walkway going into the house. Whew.

Trash pile gone! Nice and tidy. The stones in the picture will go along the shoreline, I think. 

Comparison view: (1) Trash Pile, origin story; (2) Trash Pile, decline; (3) Trash Pile, demise; (4) Trash Pile, afterlife.

On Friday, 9/13/2024, we got a 30-yard dumpster delivered. I went out that day and got started moving the trash pile into it. Scott was home working his real job.

The dumpster was so close to the trash pile (actually on top of some of it), that the door would not open. Our neighbor helped me clear a path so we could open the door. I worked a long day. I finished everything but the pile of roofing materials from the garage roof fix. 

Here are before shots of the pile.

Here's how it looked at the end of the day.

Here's the dumpster at the end of the day.

I also had a fire going all day. Here are the coals at the end of the day.

Scott spent a day digging, by hand, the hole for the cistern where the pump house used to be. The photo below is 30 inches down. He said he needs to go down to 104 inches. By the end of the day, he got down to about 50. He said he thinks it will take him one more day of hard digging to finish.

Scott spent another day digging (9/14/2024). We got there about 1, I think, and he dug until about 7 pm. 

He'd like to go a little deeper, so another hour or so of digging ahead.

This cistern will hold 1,700 gallons of water.

At the end of the day, I was a little crestfallen looking around to see our accomplishments. It didn't look commensurate with the damage done to both our bodies. I guess it is also the phenomenon of not being able to keep an accurate "before" picture in mind when looking in real time at the "after."

First, Scott removed an enormous slab of concrete with a sledgehammer. The slab used to be under the pump house he took down last weekend. When I say enormous, I mean  insanely enormous: insanely thick and insanely heavy. Normal people don't think of touching such things with their bare hands. I felt bad watching him work on it. It took so much effort. Then, after sledging chunks off, he'd load them into a wheelbarrow, cart them down to the river bank, unload them, and arrange them neatly along the shoreline.

Second, we finished gutting the bathroom and then removed all the wallboard from the walls and ceiling of the eventual kitchen. While Scott was working on the slab, I started taking the wallboard down after removing the trim and switch plates. Then he came in and did the bathroom, which included smashing a tile wall, a concrete shower pan, and a concrete floor four inches thick.

I don't have any good picture of the bathroom from the outside where you could see the 3-foot wall on the right where the tiled part of the shower was, the 2-foot wall on the right that housed the pocket door, or the pocket door. All I have are these which show the two walls but with no good idea of context or scale.

We kept the fire burning all day, and when we were exhausted and ready to go home, Scott loaded the last of the mattresses on the truck to put in the trash.