It Won't Be Long

The septic system is installed!!! I know this may not be a very glamorous post to many of you but I am ecstatic. They actually came last Friday and put it in but I'm just now getting around to downloading the photos. It doesn't take them very long to get these things in. The man started about 11:00 a.m., I think and set up his inspection for 3:00 p.m. The health department came out and looked it over, OK'd it and signed off and so he started covering it up. I got there about 5:00 maybe and they were to about this point. I have a pretty standard setup; approximately 200' of field lines; standard tank. I wish I had gotten a better close up of the field lines. They are a lot different than they used to be. These about almost 2' wide and the bottom is open. Basically, one half of a 2' corrugated black, plastic, drain pipe. There are 2 separate field lines; they run parallel to each other but one is slightly higher than the other and they are connected by small lines at the end so that when the higher one gets full (if ever) it flows over into the lower one. In this photo, you can see one of the caps on the tank over there in the lower right corner.

This is just the connection between the tank and field lines. That pipe seemed kinda small to me but I guess that's standard. They dug up one enormous rock but was able to move that and now I have a nice yard ornament but did not have any trouble with rocks that could not be moved. I was very glad for this. One thing that I was not aware of with a septic tank is that you need to fill them with water as soon as possible. The installer said that they normally do that for you but seeing as I don't have running water it would be up to me. Allen didn't mention this fact to me and so I asked the man why this was necessary. He said that if it rained very much the tank could float up out of the ground! It needed the water to weigh it down. About that same moment I heard thunder off in the distance and turned to the west to see storm clouds approaching. Oh, crap! It was bad enough to pay for this once but to pay to have it put back in the ground would be too much! In a great stroke of ingenuity, Allen quickly rigged up a little gutter system so that water flowing off the house would run into a trough and down into the septic tank. It worked pretty good and I hauled quite a few 5 gallon buckets of water from the creek and poured in it. Of course, that hardly made a noticeable difference but I had to do something. I paid $2,000.00 to have that thing put in, it's not coming back out.

Here, Allen is smoothing it all out nicely with Oliver and the box blade. He did a great job with that and now it's ready to plant grass and flowers. I'm pretty much just going to have a natural area with wildflowers and fruit trees.
This weekend we got the trail cleared through the woods where we are going to run the water lines from the spring to the house. That is about 290'. Next weekend we should be able to trench the line and install the pipe. I think we are on schedule to have running water by the end of the month. We didn't do much today as it was Mother's Day and went to spend some time with family. We needed some rest anyway.