Water, Water, Everywhere...

"...nor any drop to drink." So goes Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. And right now, it also applies to our front yard.

It all started with a surprise in the mail: A $500 water bill. Yikes! We normally use less than $100/month in water, so this was way out of line. Okay, sure, we'd been watering the plants a bit more than usual (i.e., at all) in preparation for the Historic Home Tour, but still! A 5x jump is surely evidence of a leak or a problem somewhere. Thinking quickly, we called the local water monopoly to ask for forgiveness, and they gave us a ray of hope. If we can find a leak and document the fix, they'll refund most of the exorbitant fee. So there's your incentive: Fix the leak for under $500 and you're money ahead.

Game on. I crawled under the house looking for damp spots. Nothing there. Toilets running? Nope. Teenagers showering? Not anymore. Sprinklers leaking? Hmmmm....

We never liked the drip system the previous homeowners had installed, so here was our chance to remove it. And it did appear to be leaking. The wet spots on the ground weren't always near the sprinkler heads, so that water had to be coming from somewhere. Unfortunately, our soil contains a lot of sand (okay, it is sand) so leaks can disappear very quickly. You could be pouring, say, $500 worth of water into the ground and not know it. So out comes the old sprinkler pipe.

And in with the new. We jumped into the pickup truck and headed to Home Depot, where they're painting a reserved parking spot for us. Loaded up with PVC pipe, valves, elbows, and tees, we're all set to play underground Tinker Toys.

Here's my spiffy six-valve manifold. A thing of beauty, innit? At least I was smart enough to connect it directly to the city water and not downstream from the water softener. ("Hey, how come we're out of salt again?!")

The sandy soil is easy to dig up, but as any prison escapee will tell you, it also collapses in on itself really easily. You wind up digging each trench twice, once to mark the path and again to empty out all the dirt/sand that just fell back into it. So far, I've excavated one coffee mug, half of a broken clay pot, plenty of roots, and a whole lot of old sprinkler pipe.

The hardest part so far has been routing the new pipes to the far side of the house. There's a cement walkway around our front yard, so my best route was to tunnel under it. And then to tunnel under it again to get past the front steps. So far, I've dug three tunnels, but it's quick and therapeutic work. Somehow I wind up with bigger piles of dirt than when I started, though. I can't figure out where the extra dirt is coming from. Maybe someone is sneaking dirt into our front yard in the middle of the night. Or I've disturbed some really big gophers.