Sweetwater Days 09

Water you sayin’? Part 2

Before I get into the springhouse…you know what I mean, I want to tell something else.

When we bought Sweetwater, there was a dilapidated shed behind the cabin.  Annie wanted to tear off the worst part and rebuild the rest.  As we started working on the shed, we noticed a couple rectangular shapes lying hidden beneath it.

They were petrified.

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OK, that was a little bit of a teaser.  Yes, they were petrified, but most people would just say they were solidified.  Some previous owner had thought the space under the shed was a good place to store unused bags of concrete.

It wasn’t.  The bags had sucked up moisture from the earth and probably gotten wet from rainwater flowing down the hillside too.  Anyway, the rocklike stuff is now useless except for filling holes. 

I bet it will be good for that.

Now, on to the springhouse.

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As days turned into weeks, weeks into months, etc. we would accomplish more pressing goals as we could, and I would work on the springhouse as I found the time.  Again, that took more dedicated time than you might think at first.  At our hardware store, Portland cement comes in plastic-lined bags that weigh 94 pounds. 

So each time I must either use the whole bag of cement or it has to be stored where it won’t get wet at all. Even through the plastic-lined bags the cement will absorb moisture and begin to set-up, or get hard.  The bag being open just makes that process happen quicker…unless…

Any unused cement would have to be carried up the cabin steps onto the protection of the roofed porch, then wrapped in sheet-plastic and stored where there was absolutely no chance that it would be exposed to moisture.  Simple enough, but try carrying a torn-open bag of cement without spilling it or breathing in some of the dust rising from the opening.  Believe me, Portland cement is dangerous stuff if you breathe it. 

HEED MY WARNING: DO NOT BREATHE PORTLAND CEMENT!

Thus, any weekend I worked on the stone springhouse I had to have enough time to dedicate to it that I could use full bags of cement, so I wouldn‘t risk wasting any I couldn’t use.  I found that using one bag in one day was pretty reasonable, as two or more bags took a lot of time and caused some additional physical problems.

On weekends when I used more than one bag of cement in a day, I found it unpleasant to get out of bed the following morning.  Stiff and painful describes old men’s backs pretty much all the time, requiring almost daily doses of Ibuprofen just to get started.  Working bent-over while mixing cement or moving rocks adds to that pain…a LOT.  Doing that with TWO bags doubles it…at least!

But wait, there’s more.

Annie tried to convince me the first few weekends that I should work wearing gloves while using the cement.  Well, leather or cloth gloves quickly become sodden, caked with cement, and useless.  Rubber gloves, on the other hand, soon get shredded on the rough stones and concrete.

The best solution I could find was to work bare-handed.  It might have been the best solution, but it was far from a perfect one.  You see, as I implied earlier, Portland cement is caustic.  The first day I worked my way through two bags I managed to abrade my forearms on the sides of the five gallon bucket while mixing, and to scrape my fingers and knuckles while applying the mixed cement to the rocks.  That would have been uncomfortable enough except that the cement caused wounds that were barely noticeable at the end of the day to grow and become quite painful.  Many of them took a week to heal enough to become tolerable, and two weeks to get well enough to do more cement work.

That was one of the few times I found an advantage to not being free to go to Sweetwater every weekend.  Working with the concrete before the wounds healed caused small painful wounds to become bigger, more painful ones.

Ow!

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As the sides of the springhouse went up I found it harder and harder to find close-by rocks of useable dimensions.  In my searches, I found several big rocks around the place that were of consistent thickness, had at least one flat/square side, but were way too wide one way or another.  It occurred to me that I could use the same chisel I’d used to carve out the channel in the bedrock.  If my idea worked I could use it to carve those big rocks into more useable sizes and shapes.

It worked and I did.  By laying the big, flat rocks on the ground where they were completely supported, I could minimize chances of the stone splitting in the wrong place.  Then I would “draw” a line using the chisel and tapping it gently with the sledge. After that I continued moving the chisel back and forth along the line, tapping it a couple times with the hammer before moving it a bit.  Eventually a crack would begin to show along the line.  I would continue the “tap-n-move” technique until the desired block cleaved off.  This enabled me to use some rocks that were in the way around the yard while also making them smaller and easier to move.

In the old prison movies they called it, “making big ones into little ones.”  Of course, they just used a sledgehammer and no chisel, but you get the point.

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I tried out the rock-into-block process when I was preparing to lay the top tier of the walls.  The thickness of the rocks also made it a lot easier when it came to placing the wall anchors. 

Building wooden structures up from a block or rock wall starts with cementing wall anchors between, in this case, two rocks.  After the cement sets you bolt a big board to the wall.  This board is called a sill-plate. 

I lay the squared-up 2×6 sill-plate boards on the top tier of rocks and drilled holes for the wall anchors in the right places.  Then I slid the wall anchors into their holes in the boards and put on their washers and nuts so that they could be tightened once the anchors were locked in place by the setting cement.

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As you will probably notice in the video, the front wall of the rock springhouse is much lower than the other three.  Well, when the creek was at flood stage I noticed that the water pouring off the shelf to the west side of the spring dropped enough that it allowed me to make that wall shorter. 

I intended to build a door onto the top of that low wall so that I could open the door, then swing my short legs over the wall and step in.  That would make getting into the springhouse to work on something inside a lot easier…and less unpleasant I must add. 

However, after I placed the top tier of the lower wall, I noticed that the natural rock shelf east of the springhouse matched perfectly with a big stone I had placed to correct the original wall Bobby and I had laid.  That wall had looked square to the future springhouse, but turned out not square enough, due to some changes I’d had to make to the side walls.

No, I don’t feel particularly smart, but I do feel pretty lucky.

I’m sure all that above was a little confusing, but the important thing is that I didn’t need a door.  I can lift the lid, prop it open and step up on the rock ledge, swinging the other leg over the wood and corrugated-steel wall and onto the stone I’d had to put inside to square-up the wall.

That’s what you call a fortuitous circumstance.  The wooden and sheet steel wall is stronger than the door would have been, in case some future flood is deeper than the one I saw.  Yes, a stone wall would have been stronger but I’ll stick with what I’ve got.  If I need to I can build up the stone wall later.

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Once I got the sill plate in place I added a couple 2x4s around on top of them for more height and strength (Remember, flood waters move with a lot of force.).  I built a top/lid using a 2×4 frame.  Above that I attached a 2×4 for the front wall and a 2×6 for the back one, both on edge.  Then I modified a 2×6 for each side wall, starting with the back end matching the 2×6 back-wall and cutting down at an angle to meet the 2×4 front-wall.  Thus I had a pitched roof to help shed water, snow, etc.  I added a brace across the middle and cut some scrap corrugated-steel to fit my needs and attached it for the roof, as well as using a piece of it for the front, low wall too.

That top sits perfectly on the walls with no noticeable gaps.  I added some short pieces of 2×6 to the inside back of the top so I could use longer screws to attach strong barn door hinges to the outside.

Now the springhouse was DONE!  I still needed to install the pump and some of the necessary plumbing, but I figured I had the hard part completed at that point.

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Oh wait.  I said I’d tell you more about the critters that moved in when I was building the walls of the springhouse. 

Well, just as I got to the point where I was installing the top, fall was moving in rapidly.  Every time we’d get to Sweetwater I had to remove handfuls of leaves and stuff that had blown in, partially blocking the gravity-flow drain.  I couldn’t put off installing the top, which would keep leaves and junk out of the springhouse.

But there was one problem.  A day or two before I was ready to assemble and install the top, two big frogs found their way into the enclosure and showed no inclination to find their way back out.

I didn’t want to leave the amphibians in the springhouse to starve to death, or to get sucked into the pump and pushed into the house plumbing.

Yuck.

Every time I’d open the springhouse lid I’d see one of the frogs jump off its stone shelf and shoot under the rock layer where the spring flowed out.  For several days I only saw one however, and hoped the other had smartened up and found a way out the overflow.

On a trip to Wal-Mart I picked up a dip net with an extending handle.  Recently, I took the net with me to the springhouse.  When I lifted the lid I moved quickly to put the supports in place, then grabbed the net.  I held the bottom of the net itself against the handle so that it wouldn’t hang on anything as I swung it into the springhouse and against the wall below the frog, which then cooperated by jumping right into it. 

My captive was released into the stream with no further struggle.

But wait.  As I had moved to get the frog and net out of the springhouse, I had seen a splash like a frog would make.  I looked back into the stone building but saw no sign of another frog. 

Was the splash another frog or just something I had knocked loose?  I don’t know.  I guess I may be in the frog catching business for a while longer.

We’ll see.

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More.  This year, when my son, Travis, and his eldest son, John, were here for deer hunting, we had a few minutes to relax…or to get some work done.  While Travis completed some of the wiring for the on-demand water heater, John and I worked in the creek. 

It’s not like I could keep a seven-year-old boy out of the creek anyway, right?  Might as well put him to work.

I had some 1 ½” plastic water pipe left from the early work on the springhouse, so we attached it to the end of the gravity feed pipe Annie and I had been filling our buckets and jugs from.  Remember, thus far we’d had to stand on slick rock in cold water to fill those buckets.  Well, the new pipe extends just far enough downstream that it empties about three feet above the layer of rock forming the bottom of the stream.  I dug out a notch in the bank and laid a big flat slab of rock in it to make a step for getting down into the stream.

Now we can set a bucket or jug on the bedrock layer and relax while it fills up.

I later installed a spigot on the end of the pipe so we can shut off the flow.  This then backs water up into the springhouse for when I install the pump, so it will have the maximum depth for pumping.  It will also raise the water’s depth to the level of the overflow pipe. 

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Since I wrote all that Annie and I got another long weekend off to spend working at the cabin. 

Remember, not long after we bought Sweetwater, Annie and I had discovered where some previous owner had buried a length of 1 ¼” black plastic pipe from the bank of the creek uphill and under the cabin. 

During the cleaning up of brush piles Annie had found several different lengths and sizes of black plastic pipe.  As luck would have it, there was enough 1 ¼” diameter pipe that I was able to attach it the creek-end the previous owners had buried.  This extended it to the springhouse.  There then remained exactly what I needed to attach to the end under the cabin and take it out under the side of the building.

Now I needed to know how high the pump in the springhouse would push the water.  It wouldn’t do if I installed the 275 gallon IBC tote between the four posts and the water couldn’t be pumped up high enough to fill it.

First I used the broom and dustpan from the cabin to clean out as much loose sand and gravel as I could from the floor of the springhouse and from under the rock ledge the spring flowed from.  I want to keep as much of that stuff as possible out of the pump.  Stuff that gets sucked in with the water will end up in the cabin’s water system, and shorten the pumps’ lives in the process.

Next I assembled the plumbing I needed to attach the pump to the pipe going uphill and pieced it together with the pump in place inside the springhouse.

I intend to install an electric supply line from the cabin to the springhouse.  There are some obstacles I’ll need to overcome before I do that so, for the initial test of my system, I ran a long extension cord from the cabin, through the woods along the bank of the stream, across the dry creek bed above the spring, and plugged the wire from the pump into it.

Annie plugged the other end of the extension cord in up at the cabin’s GFI (Ground Fault Interrupter) outlet while I watched and listened as the pump hummed into action.  Small leaks around some hose clamps showed that it was indeed pumping water.

So far so good.

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Back at the cabin I scrounged another piece of the 1 ¼” black plastic pipe to attach to the end sticking out from the side of the structure.  The addition gave us enough to extend the pipe up along the four railroad ties I had used for corner posts for the tower.  The open end was even with the cabin’s roof.

Now to test it.  I signaled Annie and she again plugged in the extension cord leading to the springhouse pump.

The pipe I had sticking up to the roofline of the cabin immediately sagged downward under the weight and beautiful, crystal clear spring-water gushed forth.  I maneuvered the pipe back up to prove for absolutely sure that I was getting the height I needed.

I had the height I needed…and more.

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Annie and I shut things down for that weekend so we could get home in time for me to go to work (at my full-time job), but we have plans for getting more done on our water system as soon as possible.

I’ll install some rails and cross-bracing for raising the IBC tote in the tower, then assemble the piping to get the water into it.

Second eldest son, JB, suggested I install a sediment bowl-type water filter in that line.  It should stop any sand and tiny gravel from getting into the tank and thus on into the second pump, which will pressurize the water system in the cabin.  Then I’ll install the plumbing from the bottom of the tank, through the pressure pump, and into the building.

Without going into more detail, at that point we will have water in our little cabin.  That means no more bathing in the creek or carrying jugs of water uphill for everyday use…unless we just want to, for old times’ sake, you know.  Of course, it means no more using a bucket on the front porch for “personal” purposes.  I don’t see us getting nostalgic for that.

When that day comes, it will be nice.  Oh yes, it will be nice.

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I have propped the flapper valve open on that overflow pipe of the springhouse, and will leave it that way for a few days.  Hopefully the other frog will see the light, swim to the pipe, and hop out…and nothing else will hop in.

We’ll see.

I’ll write another update on the water system when I make enough progress. And I’ll let you know about the frog too.

Wish my flipper-footed friend and me good luck.

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