So, we started our vacation with a broken water line. Yep, as I mentioned in my last post, the main water line was leaking.

Which meant we turned off the water most of the time. We bailed water out of the pool to flush the toilets and used bowls and pitchers of water for hand washing. Don’t get me wrong, I was thankful to have water so close to my house. Fun Facts: most folks in the world spend hours a day searching for water and more than half the people hospitalized are from water borne diseases.

I am lucky, even if inconvenienced.

My Friday, instead of writing, I cleared away the rock, pavers, and weed barrier to see how bad the leak was.

All the way to the pas the hose bib, which was about 50 feet.

And that was the easy part. The hubbinator became a mud dog on Saturday. He had to hand dig out the protoquicksand that the yard had begun because right next to it was our electric service line, cable service line, and heaven only knew what.

We called the blue stake folks and hope to have someone out tomorrow to mark the lines so we can dig up the rest of the line and replace it. We were not happy to see the water line dip to nearly 30 inches below the grade. Really? We live in Phoenix, Arizona. Freezing is not an issue here.

But we did have a bit of luck. Seems the morons who replaced our line with 8 foot sections of glued together irrigation pipe (this is the second connection to fail this summer), didn’t yank out all the copper piping. We found one end that our plumber was able to attach the new line to.

After the utilities are marked we’ll trench to the hose bib and find the other end of the copper line and we hope to never, ever have this problem again (at least in this house).

Until next time!