Weekly Update: 2.1.26

Last weekend’s snowstorm turned into a cold, snowy week. We have been struggling with our plumbing ever since, a fact that put us into simple survival mode most days. We were slowed down, but we didn’t mind too much. We enjoyed more downtime than normal, and we made significant progress on a few low-priority projects.

The first of our plumbing troubles emerged last Saturday when we woke to find the water pipes to our bathtub/shower were not working. Our water lines are all in our floors and interior walls, so we have never had any issues with them freezing in the past — aside from an exterior spigot out of the way from regularly used pipes. We should have had the bath dripping overnight, but we were a bit nervous to have such a small amount of water running through our exposed drainpipes. We don’t have the skirting around our pier foundation yet, and we didn’t want slow moving water to freeze. In hindsight, we ought to have just dripped the tub, as this isn’t far from our septic.

It took four days for the shower pipes to thaw. Thankfully, since the sinks were all functional, we stayed pretty clean. We cheered once the water started running, only to discover that the bathtub could not drain — the water in the p-trap had frozen. We had this happen earlier in the year, but we had since insulated that part of the drainpipes. Despite pouring hot water and salt into the trap, we could not get it to thaw for another day. Finally, our dad and brother removed the insulation from it and used a heat gun to thaw the pipe.

Grace captured various animal tracks all over the snow.

We had one good day of normal water. It was lovely. Everyone showered. We washed everyone’s bedding, as no one had felt quite their normal level of clean. We thought we were in the clear of any more water problems from the storm.

And then we woke up Friday morning to significantly dropped water pressure. We checked our well house, and the heat lamp there seemed to be working. We looked for leaks everywhere we could see. Everything appeared to be normal. We wondered if there was ice somewhere in the line. We hoped it would improve with normal water use. By Friday night, the water only seemed lower. Saturday morning, it was barely working at all. The single-digit temps kept us all inside until afternoon, when the men of the family bundled up to go see if they could figure out what was wrong.

They had barely been gone 10 minutes when the water pressure started to improve. I opened the door to find out how they had fixed it, and they were somewhat confused. They hadn’t done much yet. They had turned the heat lamp on, as they didn’t think the auto switch was working right (it is supposed to come on if the temperature becomes low in the well house). After some discussion, we all surmised that the problem is our water filter clogging up. Our dad flushed it before re-installing it. By evening, we were losing pressure again. We opted to remove the filter for now. Our water is, thankfully, back to normal.

When we weren’t fussing with the plumbing this week, I took advantage of the downtime to get some lower priority projects done. I sorted through a bunch of old family photos that had gotten mixed up during our various moves. I spent time working on the crochet ponchos we sisters have been making for our nieces. The project ended up being much more time consuming than we anticipated, but it has felt good to make progress. Grace sweetened up our busyness with snow-day cupcakes one afternoon, a tradition she and Bonnie-Jean started in college.

On Friday, we made a batch of blackberry jam with blackberries we picked last summer. We have had the ingredients for this jam for ages, but we simply hadn’t made time to prepare it.

Despite the slow pace, it was an exhausting week. I often find the lack of routine rather draining. Along with the mild annoyance of our plumbing issues, I dealt with migraines most of the week. It could all have been worse, but it was tiring, nonetheless. Still, we all took great pleasure in looking out the windows at the snow. The cold weather has made it last longer than it usually seems to. I had more time to read than I have in a while, and I managed to finish three books that I had been slogging through for months. In all the chaos, I barely noticed the end of January. And yet, I woke this morning to a new month. Today is the feast day of St. Brigid of Ireland, and we plan to celebrate with scones and some of our blackberry jam.