Real-Life Renovation Is Nothing Like HGTV: Part 3
Or: Never Drill a Well on Friday the 13th!
This summer we decided to drill a well on the Lincoln School property. It would be the last utility, then we’d have everything in place: electric, septic, water. Not bad for a couple of bootstrappers and a place that was so off-grid when we bought it in 2021 that only the memory of its original utilities still hung around, like the janky 1950s light switches and electric box wired into the southwest corner of the building, and a hand-dug well (maybe? we’ve never seen proof) that may once have served the schoolhouse kitchen. Certainly there was no official septic; the first bathrooms were latrines that emptied into a pit in the ground and the students probably risked a nasty bite from a giant hobo spider every time they squatted over it. Anyway! A well it was.
Having made our intention to drill a well clear to our general contractor, we were surprised but not shocked when he texted before we even left Austin for the summer to say he had a well-driller who could help us out. We gave this man and his team the go-ahead even though we would not yet be on site to supervise or weigh in on things like well location, since after all, he and not us was the expert! He showed up on Friday the 13th (of course)—we could see him on the school security cam—and his rig stayed parked there for one hour, then two, then six, before we really started to worry. You see, our neighbors’ wells go to 93 feet and 125 feet, respectively, so we naturally expected a shallow well. And in this business, you pay per foot drilled. So when the hours went by without the expected (hoped for) “We hit water!” message, well. Who could say what was happening at the Lincoln School on that auspicious day and why?
Finally, around 4:30 p.m., the well driller texted. “We’re going deep,” he wrote. “Keep your phone handy tomorrow in case there’s a decision to be made.” Without further clarification, we assumed he could only mean one decision: Go beyond the high end of the original estimate and keep drilling, or call it quits and shell out thousands for a dry hole. That’s a hard truth about well-drilling: It’s an inexact science. You can consult hydrology maps and dowse with brass rods or use any other number of predictive methods, but in the end, you hit water or you don’t. It sounded like we hadn’t, and maybe weren’t going to!
“That’s a hard truth about well-drilling: In the end, you hit water or you don’t.”
That night, I woke up several times caught in anxiety spirals about what, only in retrospect, seemed like our poor decision-making. Every time I woke, I calmed myself by channeling that anxious energy into visualizing water bubbling up out of the earth and rock. I didn’t know what the well site looked like, or what the well itself was supposed to look like, so I focused on what I did know: the look and smell and feel of cold, wet, pure water. And without insinuating that my visualizations had anything to do with it, reader, let me tell you: When the well-drilling team showed up again the next day, cold, wet, pure water was indeed bubbling up out of that 400-foot hole. It had filled in overnight, and proven itself an actual artesian well—so pressurized and plentiful that weeks later, it spills out over the well cap and shows no sign of slowing.
As Brandon says, having an artesian well is both a blessing and a curse. It’s great because we should always have good water pressure, and as one of the deepest wells in the area, we shouldn’t run dry. But constantly flowing water can cause some problems, too. Namely, erosion to the surrounding land. So, after our contractor dug up the driveway to plumb the well into the schoolhouse foundation, and the plumber put in the pressure vessel that allowed us to put a spigot at the well site, we then had to lay an extra line of PVC pipe leading from the well head to the culvert to siphon off that extra water. It will drain back into the ground eventually, of course, or join the brook on the west side of the property, so it’s never wasted. (Trust me, the last thing Texans want to do is waste water!)
Anyway, long story short, we now have water (yay!) and are one step closer to gutting the inside of the school. As usual, it didn’t go like we’d thought, and certainly not as seamlessly as it appears to on HGTV. But that’s why this series is called “Real-Life Renovation Is Nothing Like HGTV.” What we’re doing here is hard, and real, and we’re happy to have you along for the journey.
Here’s the overflowing well head, two days after the well was drilled!
Tree stump removal for site plumbing, Mariaville, Maine.
Our general contractor hand-built this contraption from scrap materials. It fed the pump and water pipe 375 feet down the well!
