Oh, the fun!

Where to begin??

Chatting on the phone with Mindy about 10 days ago, I walked into the barn and found the frost free/non-freezing water spigot hissing.  Mindy confirmed my fears...it's needing repair/replaced.  Wahooo!

I relayed my problem to my husband.  Oh, boy he was excited.  Not.  He also failed to react as quickly as I'd like.  So I chatted with the Co-Op employees and took home a new handle/spout and  and actual entire replacement unit.

I then decided to start with replacing the handle myself... First issue, the shut off valve was leaking...then the handle/pipe was painted together, and I then failed to get the pipe wrench braced against the wall, so when I tried to turn the handle, I ended up turning the entire unit.

This I knew was not good.  So I stopped and insisted ye ol' husband give me a hand on Sunday.  Hoping for the best and planning for the worst, we went out Sunday morning hoping for at the most a couple of hours of work.

Well, of course that was not to be...  We first tried digging from the inside out.  What a mess.  For the record, it is impossible to properly dig out a spigot and pipe in a 26 inch square space.  So after we spent an hour trying to get to the bottom of the 5 foot bury depth of the pipe from the inside, we went and started digging towards it from the outside in.

Took us about another hour and a half to get to the bury depth from the outside.  It was awesome. Not!!  Once we were at bury depth we were able to see that there was a wee bit of damage from my attempt of fixing it myself.

I'd snapped the union at the anti back flow valve.  Awesome...  Now not only is our shut off valve at the barn leaking, we can't easily fix this issue now!!

Oh, did I mention that it was 26 degrees outside while we were working?  And that is was trying to snow off and on then entire time?

ALL the animals served as quite the peanut gallery.

I bought a new water tank...300 gallons, hoping to keep Fi out of it...and away from the heater!  She wasted my last heater...

The donkeys begged for food.  The horses did too...

Then Fiona put her head through the fence, so that Chad could be irritated with her as well as the really cool job his wife had him helping her with!

The dogs played, then whined about the cold...

I'd put them in the house for 15 minutes or so.  Then let them back out.

It's become obvious that we've got to get Seven a coat and Kage a new one.  It's just too cold for the hairless dogs.  Abbi doesn't seem to notice a thing about the weather!  (0: 

After we marched all around the property with the "key" checking all the turn off's hoping beyond hope that one of them cut the barn water off from the main line, we had to accept defeat.

The only way to  turn off the water at the barn and the leaking valve was to turn off the water to the entire property.

Our plan of attach was not to take a break and warm up and then dig everything out more, so that we could measure everything and figure out what we needed from Home Depot.

So we did that...then we talked about how much daylight we had to work with in the evenings...

Then we talked about what our limits were...  Then we talked about a plumber... Then we talked about finding someone through references...  Then we talked about who to call...

Then I had an epiphany...

I'd call Jake, my farrier!!

After about 5 hours of digging, head scratching, head aching, loud complaining, and going from sweating like crazy to freezing, I reached out for a life line!

And Jake came through big.

I placed a call on Sunday afternoon, dropped Jake's name (he told me to).  And before noon on Monday afternoon, I had my water fixed.  It wasn't expensive and it took less than 45 minutes.  And now we're up and running.

I do have to finish filling in the hole tomorrow...I ran out of time, and energy tonight...and for the life of me can't find the tamper...  But I've got part of my back fill done and everything is in good working order.

Who's my go to guy for info this month?

My farrier!

I figure I owe Jake a couple of cocktails for the help...so before this weekend, I'll hit up the liquor store so I can go by Jake's house for a proper thank you!  (0:

**Not sure why blogger posted my pictures out of order.  Guess it's having one of those days...**