On Saturday morning we went to Hagebau, our local home improvement store, and finally bought the pump hose and fittings to set up the pump for our watering system. The previous owner of this house ran piping around most of the outside buildings so that he could have water on demand in the garden, horse stalls, pig stalls and around the courtyard.
We bought a new pump when we bought the house because the old one was about 20 years old and bit the dust. It also happened to weigh about 100 pounds and was quite a mission to hoist into the trash container a while back. Our new pump is from Gardena (Hauswasserwerk 5000/5) but needed a bit of cleaning up since it was covered in construction dust.
The pump used to be located in the workshop which is now the kitchen. It was sitting about where our glass doors are now. So when we brought that room into the house, we had to find a new place for the pump. Our solution: move it up to the attic. Thankfully this has proved to be no problem so far although it would be nice if the hose could reach a bit further into the well.
Here’s the pump hiding in the attic. I finally took a few photos up there as well which I will post some photos of later. It is just full of stuff but we won’t even attempt to do anything with it until the fall when it’s cooler. At the moment the only times it’s cool outside, it’s raining…otherwise it’s so hot you feel like you’re in a sauna up there.
Our main goal was to have running water in the garden. What we didn’t realize is that the PO didn’t put a faucet on the tap in the garden. We have no clue how we would have overlooked this when we first had the pump hooked up because when the pump was running, water was just gushing out of the connection. But perhaps we were just never out there when we actually had the pump connected…there is a rain bucket underneath it and the bucket was quite full so perhaps we were just collecting the water without realizing it.
No project we take on is completely without mishap and by the end of the day we were both soaking wet. We will need to get some new piping for the garden faucet so we can have a split off for our Gardena watering system and also have a regular hose connection. We also seem to need some new rubber fittings or at the very least some sort of rubber sealant to keep the hoses together better since we have a couple of leaks now.
Stefan was actually quite disenchanted by the experience. I think he feels his handyman skills aren’t satisfactory and that things just never really turn out the way he wants. I’m thinking another break is needed sometime soon…or perhaps a break from work and full immersion into the house since just doing a few things here and there when we have time doesn’t really get much done around here.
