The Saga of the Water Main - Now With a New and Improved Ending!

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Just when I think the water main guys have abandoned us, they show up again in force. They were apparently waiting on yet another part. We arrived at the house last Monday to asphalt cutting and more vacuum truck action. They were cutting holes and installing connectors for our neighbors connections to the new waterline.

 And they made the street cut across to our lot. Later in the week we had an actual waterline running to our lot.

The real fun began when they pressurized the new waterline. Apparently they do this to test for leaks. But the crazy thing is that the plastic pipe they use actually expands under pressure. So they have to pressurize, take readings every eight hours and re-pressurize, until the pressure readings stop dropping. If the readings keep dropping after three days there's a leak.

 

IRL the eastern-most end of the pipe has a pressure gauge, but I don't have a photo of it sitting here typing on the hotel guest computer tablety-thing. More on that later. Jesse and Brad came by every eight hours or so last Saturday and Sunday, checking the pressure and re-pressurizing the line. By Monday they were ready for the civil engineers to come and sign off. 

Approval gained on Monday afternoon, they emptied and swabbed the line and filled it with chlorinated water. The pressure was tested again, along with a water sample that was taken to a lab in Longview, Washington for testing. Water sample approved, on Tuesday the line was emptied and swabbed again and pressurized with water from the city supply. The water in the line was sampled for testing again on Wednesday. Pending test results, we have the go-ahead from the City to connect the neighborhood supply lines to the new water main on Monday!

Back to the hotel digression...While all this water main stuff was going on there were several other things happening. First, the concrete crew has been working diligently on the retaining wall - more on that in my next blog. We have been spending six hours a day or more cleaning and prepping the house for move-in, until recently assumed to be sometime in November. And likely the most important thing, we received a temporary certificate of occupancy allowing us to move all our (stuff) from the storage unit in Portland into the house! 

I had an appointment in Portland with the nose specialist yesterday (everything looks good, but because of the tiny breaks at the bridge of my nose its going to take a good nine months to heal completely). And Scott will be rocking out tonight to The Pretenders and Foo Fighters with his twin brother Angel. So tomorrow seemed like the perfect time to rally the troops and move everything to Astoria. Having, in my questionable wisdom, decided to leave my laptop at home, I'm relegated to working within the framework and overt security limitations of a Hilton Business Center (really?) computer to bring you this news.

Have a great weekend!