The Well and the Slab Insulation

The well has been dug! Well, at least we hope so... they don't have a final reading on the water flow yet. So here's the story... we have two wells already on the property, but they're both unusable. One is a modern artesian that pumps plenty of water and is 180 ft. deep, but is too far from the house to be of any use. The other is an older style well that is only a few feet deep now. It's also too far from the house site.

We assumed the new well, near the house, would be roughly the same depth as the artesian near the road. We were wrong, however, and we've learned a lot about wells this week. Our new well was dug through 440' of solid rock, and still didn't pump enough water. The options were to either dig deeper, or use a method called hydrofracturing, at a cost of about $1,800. It's not guaranteed to work, though neither is a deeper hole, so either choice entails a bit of risk.

We chose to hydrofracture, so the well company pumped in 2,400 gallons of water, then pressurized it to 900 psi, until the pressure broke and dropped to about 100 psi, indicating that a vein underground had broken, and opened up a new passageway somewhere. They went down another couple hundred feet and did the same thing, pressurizing the water to 1,100 psi until it broke and dropped again. After the pressure has equalized and they can get an accurate reading on the water flow, we'll know how it all worked. Until then, we can rest easy knowing that the well is a cool $10,000 over budget. Yippee.

Our house was built by the Blues Brothers.

The well truck getting started. It's an enormous truck that lifts completely off the ground with the integrated hydraulic systems.

440' of rock has to go somewhere. The powder ran everywhere and tracks everywhere, but it won't be long until the site work is done and we clean up all this mess.
Karen and Mindy worked on priming a lot more of the exterior siding. They'll probably be finished this week, and shortly after that we'll get started with the real paint color.Which we have chosen, by the way! It's called Cranberry Zing, and just to be clear, it's the red on the right, not the pink on the left.
We set up some workspace in the living room. For now, we have the band saw, the jointer, and an assembly table. We bought a Bosch router this week, and that will also be out at the house soon enough. Mindy is heading to Andy and Chris' parent's place tomorrow morning with the Subie and the trailer to pick up the cherry wood for the kitchen.More pinkness. We laid 2" of extruded polystyrene on the basement floor. It looks neat having a totally flat floor down there, even though the surface isn't entirely uniform yet.
Benson also helped with the insulation in the basement. He liked to tape the seams best.
Karen helped in the basement, too. It was a pain fiddling around the plumbing bits.
The next step was to lay down the wire mesh on top of the foam. The tubing for the radiant system will be zip-tied to the mesh early next week. Ideally, the slab will be poured by the time I write next week's post.