Story of the Mound and the Cistern

Our dirt mound is gone.  Hurray!  One of the bonus features of the little house we bought, in addition to random trash piles, and a burned down building, is that it came with a strange mound of dirt in the front yard.  There has been much speculation about why the dirt was mounded there, and what it was concealing.  Was it part of the septic system, a buried cistern, or a grave? What ever it was, it was a bit of an eyesore, despite the irises that grew on one side of it. 

The photo above shows the dirt mound in all it's glory, right next to the corner of the house in the front yard.  Jamie and I dug into it with a shovel, and hauled several loads of dirt to low places in the yard, but found only nice top soil with small gravel in it.  In my imagination, a hoarder type person, like myself, had the opportunity to salvage some top soil and instructed whomever was hauling the dirt it dump it off at his house.  Probably, the person who wanted the dirt never got around to doing whatever they planned on doing, so it became a fixture in the yard, and someone tried to beautify the ugly hump by planting irises on it.  Or someone buried a cow that died in the yard.  

Brandon and I were just packing up to leave last Sunday, after working hard all day destroying the kitchen, when our neighbor visited us with his fancy tractor that has a bucket on the front, and offered to dig into the mound and see what was in it.  Well, we were beat, but not so tired that we would pass up the offer of a helping hand from a man who wants to play with his new tractor by moving our dirt.  We try to be accommodating neighbors, after all.    

We worked into the night loading scoops of dirt onto Brandon's rickety old trailer and hauling it to where I hope the garden will be, and shoveling it off the trailer.  This would be a more interesting story if I could tell you that we found bones, or a secret lair under all the dirt.  Nope, just dirt.  The whole process was complicated by the repeated failures of the trailer, which wasn't up to such heavy loads.  By the end of the job, the poor thing had two busted tail lights, one side was torn off, and the welds in mechanism that allows the trailer to dump were busted.  Our neighbor works for the railway, and was a whiz with a giant sledge hammer.  Every time something would break he would pound it back in place long enough for us to take another load.  We moved our dirt mound but wrecked our trailer.  It's hard to get ahead.  

Since we spread the dirt in the dark, I was glad to see that we got it spread fairly well.  It looks good next to my garden carpets, huh?  

Speaking of looking good, this is a picture of every cooks dream kitchen, right?  Jeez, what a disaster!  Everything is coming out - the ceiling, the walls, and now the floor.  It's a good thing this is a tiny house, or we may never get everything put back.  

Now that the floor is up, we can get a good look at the plumbing.  It's as bad as we thought, so we get to try our hand at running new water lines.  Yippee!  Brandon's been educating himself, and thinks we can handle it.  Thank goodness for YouTube tutorials.  

The house was originally plumbed to an underground cistern, which collected water from the roof, but in the more recent past had "city water."  The city water line runs from the road, along the side of the driveway to an outside spicket near the cistern, and a pipe then goes into the cistern and attaches to the plumbing that goes into the house, cutting off the cistern, but still using the same pipes.  We confirmed this theory by digging around the spicket and opening the cistern, which had concrete slabs chained over it, so we had never looked in it until now.    

Jamie and Leigh came over for a cookout the evening we were doing our plumbing investigations, and got to be there for the grand cistern uncapping.  We were trying to figure out how deep the cistern was and the only thing I could find that was long enough to drop to the bottom was some of the old electrical wires that we've pulled out of the house.  Turns out we have twelve feet of water in a cistern with an eight foot diameter, plus one drowned mouse.  If I strained my math muscles I might be able to figure out how many gallons this is.  

We had big laughs about using an electrical wire, complete with attached outlets, as our water depth probe.  I wanted to get a picture of Jamie dropping the outlets into the cistern, and Leigh stuck her head in the photo.  We laughed even harder after seeing this picture.  It's just so weird and creepy!  Seriously, what would you think was going on in this picture if no one told you?