My family recently experienced an event that taught several life lessons that I hope my kids will remember and learn from. First, I want to ask you a question.
How much water do you use?
Have you ever thought about how much of this resource you use every single day? Our daily tasks of brushing our teeth, washing dishes, laundry, flushing a toilet, washing our hands after using the toilet, taking a shower, watering our plants, wetting a wash cloth to wipe off a sticky spot on the table or perhaps a child’s face. There are so many ways we use water and each time we use water, for Americans, it’s quite often as simple as opening a faucet.
We got to experience what life was like when access to water was not quite so easy for almost two weeks when our well stopped working. When water doesn’t just come out of the faucet anymore, it really makes you stop and think about how badly does everyone really need to bathe that night or how just a few drops of water are needed to moisten that toothbrush.
I will backtrack a little bit. We knew we would need a new well at some point. The well on our property had been there since my husband’s grandparents bought the land in the 1940s or perhaps 1950s. It was the “pump jack” style of well where it used leather cups to lift the water to a pressure tank which then fed into the house. It was very old and we had been nursing it along the last few years. When we first moved to the property, we needed it repaired maybe once or twice a year but after three increasingly expensive and shorter-lasting repairs in the last seven months, we finally pulled the metaphorical trigger on getting a new well. I am not going to lie. It was hard but it wasn’t hard because you need to have water so it was going to have to happen. I was and still am wincing about the price tag. It crossed the four-digit range into five digits when we got the estimate.
The day before Thanksgiving, the drilling company staked where the new well would be be located (and the kids were given instructions not to pull up the wooden stake with the cheerful yellow flagging). We still had water at the house even if the old pump wasn’t as efficient. But we were still functioning. The Monday after Thanksgiving? The well wasn’t functioning any longer. In panic mode, I called the well service company and asked how soon we could get the new well drilled. The previous conversation when water was still flowing gave me a four- to six-week waiting period. Without water, I didn’t think that was a great timetable anymore.
We were fortunate that they were able to have the new well drilled the following week and they reestablished water to the house by the end of that week. All told, we were without water for 12 days. Not quite two full weeks. I have never appreciated a functioning well the way I do now. We can open a faucet and there is water again. We can flush toilets, wash dishes, and clean laundry. The biggest thing for me was being able to have my hot showers again. Some people drink coffee to wake up in the morning; I like my steaming showers.
So, while the well was out of commission, here is what we did to work around the problem. We invested in more five-gallon plastic water jugs. We didn’t drink the well water to begin with. It has a lot of minerals in it and kidney stones are both painful and expensive; so, we have a water cooler and originally three five-gallon jugs we would rotate out with filtered water I purchased in town. Without the well, we bought three more so we would have 30 gallons of water in the home to meet our needs. I was refilling at least two jugs per day every day, sometimes three.
Flushing toilets is a huge water consumption so we adopted the “if it’s yellow…” policy though when you have boys and you’re in the country, nature is sometimes more convenient. The boys would take what we called “spit baths” growing up. I would heat up water in the microwave and they would use dampened wash cloths to soap up the most important – and odorous – bits and then rinse with the leftover water. We kept pitchers of water in the bathrooms and by the kitchen sink for washing hands and brushing teeth. Dishes were a problem so I bought groceries that didn’t require a lot of cooking in the stove or oven. Yes, this was more expensive but we were just needing enough to get by. We also bought paper plates (they will decompose) to also minimize dishes to wash.
Laundry. I had to haul all of our laundry to the laundromat. I went first thing in the morning, armed with a $10 roll of quarters and a handful of small bills just in case I had to get more quarters. With three laundry baskets of clothes, I had a lot but didn’t think it would cost more than $10 to wash and dry it all. I was wrong. Admittedly, it has been a while since I had to use a laundromat. Aside from the apartment one we used before moving into our current home, I would estimate it has been 11 or 12 years since I have used a laundromat.
Mistake #1. I didn’t scope out the machines to see which ones were the cheapest. I picked the “triple loader” since those were closest to the door and on the end of the row. They were $3.50 per machine. I needed three of them for the amount of laundry we had.
Mistake #2. Forgetting that I had a perfectly good dryer that still functioned at home. Yes, I paid to dry my clothes at the laundry mat instead of hauling them home wet and drying them there. That was $0.25 for eight minutes of drying time. It took for-ev-er to dry. So I ended up spending about another $1 per load in the drying.
Mistake #3. Not snatching up the dryers that were recently used so they were already warmed up inside. Fortunately there was a guy getting his laundry out when I was trying to load another dryer; I asked him how long the machines took after being exasperated with the first two loads still being wet after 16 minutes and 50 cents. He suggested I use the machine he just vacated. That one took a quarter less to dry the clothes in it.
Silver lining: I managed to get all of the laundry washed and dried in an hour and a half. I also hauled it all home so everyone could help fold. Many hands make light the work, as my mother liked to say growing up.
Second silver lining: This is what savings is for. This kind of expenditure sucks but I am very thankful that this financial setback won’t kill us. I’m not jumping up and down with joy about paying a huge bill like this but I am thankful that we have savings to help soften this blow… and that the water well services company has a payment plan.
The whole experience, while exasperating and expensive, helped my kids see that water is definitely not something to take for granted. It took quite a bit of money to get a new well. It took additional money to keep us supplied with our bottled water as well as time to heat it up for a basic bath or to wash minimal dishes. And yet, we are still privileged in how easily we can access water in one way or another.
Going Green In Texas 