What you don't appreciate in modern life...

This week the well-digger is supposed to come and we will find out just how deep the water table is. This is the first step. After he gets the well drilled and puts in a pipe down to the water, we have someone else who will come install a solar pump system, then someone else will bring his excavator up and put in a cistern to store the water and water lines deep enough not to freeze in the Montana winter and a septic system. Then, once we do the plumbing ourselves, we'll have real honest-to-goodness indoor plumbing.

Meanwhile, I've been using the water tank system. There is one big water tank behind the house (see the picture in the June post) and two smaller water tanks in the bathhouse. I have a portable water tank that I put in the back of the truck and drive around the bend to our neighbor who has a developed spring on his property. He lets me fill the portable tank with his hose. Then I drive back over to my house and park high enough up the hill that I can hook up my own hose and gravity-feed the water into the tanks. It takes about five trips to fill the house tank, and one trip for each of the bathhouse tanks.

There is a rain-water collection system that uses the roof gutters, but it was all disassembled for winter and I haven't had time to figure out how to put it back together. Later we'll use that for irrigation water for the garden.

The tanks in the bathhouse feed into an on-demand propane water heater that produces lovely hot showers into our antique claw-foot tub at the flip of a switch. The tank behind the house provides cold water only that is pumped up (by a little electric pump below the house), again at the flick of a switch, into the kitchen sink and comes out through an old-style farm pump. Here's a picture of the kitchen sink in operation:

When we have been up here in the winter, we have heated water on the wood stove to use for washing dishes, and we will probably continue that until we figure out what kind of water heating system we can use for the kitchen sink. Since we are running the wood stove to heat the house, it is simple to put water on to heat, and it helps humidify the air as well:

But in the summer, it is too hot to fire up the stove, and I hate to waste propane heating up water just for dishes, so I have gotten in the habit of putting 5-gallon water bottles out in the sun all day. About the time I've finished dinner, there is more hot water (too hot to put my hands in!) than I can use.

This system works so effortlessly that I'm not sure we'll need to change it. We'll see. I've never had to think quite so much about where my water comes from before.