That fall and winter didn’t go fast enough. I had the property and the horses to take care of by myself. We gave away the chickens we had in WI, and started feeding the horses large round bales, so that cut down on the work some.
That first winter we discovered most of the windows had serious leaks. I “shrink wrapped” the windows, and it was fun to watch the plastic bulge when the wind blew. This wasn’t a surprise, most of the windows were quite old, but I grew up thinking it was normal for windows to howl on cold windy winter nights. I also grew up in a house that had central heat – one big grate in the floor in the middle of the downstairs. Me and my sisters used to run downstairs on a winter morning and stand over the grate and let the warm air blow up our flannel nightgowns. Might not have been that bad if we lived somewhere other than
I also had to deal with frozen pipes a few times. Meant getting dressed, going outside and clearing the snow off the access to the cellar. We put a space heater on a thermostat to help take care of that problem, but that problem, along with wanting somewhere to go during bad summer storms (other than hopping in the truck and heading the other direction) made me want a REAL basement.
We finally got the WI house sold in late April 2004, and my husband and adult son (22 at the time) moved in. I had asked my son to move in with me when it looked like we might not have the WI house sold after all, and then the deal went through so I now had two adult men living with me.
That’s when the septic problems started . . .
We had a wet spring, and the sump pump in the cellar seemed to be running all the time. Out of curiosity, we hauled out a 150 gallon stock tank and put the end of the hose in it. Got up the next morning and it was overflowing. Pumping over 150 gallons of water out of your basement every day didn’t sound like a good thing to me . . .
We talked to some neighbors, including the farmer to the north, who had owned the house at one time, and found out the house had always had a problem with water. Some thought the place must be on a spring. It is quite flat out here, and last May there was a lot of standing water around, so we hoped when it dried out, maybe the water problem would subside. After all, I wanted a REAL basement – not a good idea when the 6 foot deep cellar filled up with a foot of water when the sump pump quit running.
Then my husband noticed a correlations – the sump pump worked a lot more right after someone flushed the toilet or took a shower. We talked to the neighbors again, and found out that old cistern had been converted for use as a septic tank, and it was only a few feet from the house. From there, a leech line went across the yard (100ft) to a secondary tank. He thought there was a drain field, but was pretty certain it had gotten trenched through at some point.
And if you are wondering, No, we did not have the septic inspected before we bought the house. We knew it was a very old system, and simply expected to be replacing it at some future date – just didn’t expect it to be the next year.
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