Renovating the existing cottage Sep 2007

In September 2007 Guy and I had access to the cottage, prior to that a family were still renting it, they loved it too. They lived in a very natural eco friendly way, "off the grid" as people like to call it and they had been very happy there for the previous eighteen months. Since January 2007, when we first met the owners of the cottage and they agreed to sell it to us, Guy and I had been finding it hard to curb our excitement, literally having to force ourselves not to go driving up the track to see the cottage or go walking past it at every opportunity. We both felt that we would be happy living at the cottage, (albeit with a little modernisation!) and we were keen to move in, but, we had mixed feelings about it. Our moving in, meant the rental family moving out and we knew how much they loved being there too. Our reaction was similar when we thought about the couple that were selling to us, afterall the cottage had been in their family for a very long time and they had many happy memories of their times spent there.


As soon as we had access we made a start, first thing..... Getting a borehole dug!

Borehole drilling rig arrives

Rig erected....let the drilling commence!

Borehole rig

2 weeks later and the first water from borehole, it was a bit gritty!

We needed to get a running water supply to the house. There was a rainwater collection tank on the land, installed a longtime ago, that could be used for loo flushing, we weren't sure it was a good idea to use it for drinking from either, we decided that without a backup mains supply to cut in when rainwater levels were low, a borehole would be a good idea. This meant drawing our water up from underground, from a natural water supply right beneath our feet! I'd never given too much thought to water running deep underground, but as it turned out, alot of the people in our area were using boreholes and they were really happy with the 
results.  

Good enough to bottle it!

Guy's happy with the first bottle!

The borehole was pretty expensive to drill out and being quite high up on the hill might not have helped, would it have been cheaper if we hadn't been 400' up, and does the water table vary in height I wondered, anyway, we needed to go down about 180 feet to tap into a reliable (in times of drought!) depth of water. It took two weeks of boring before we got to the water supply, it was definitely a eureka moment! The rig used for the boring was a straightforward structure, the frame looked like a big sturdy version of a frame for a childs swing. Then hanging in the middle was a long tube of heavy metal, hollow, it was being suspended by a cable that was attached to a winch, which had it's engine attached to a big generator. The metal tube would be dropped down and because of its heavy weight it would pummel the ground and earth would be rammed up inside its hollow core. This was a repetitive process and noisey too, most of the time I escaped to work and left the two chaps on the job to it.  The water comes into the house and into a pressure tank which always indicates about 3.5 bar, from there it goes through a U.V. filter to kill off any nasty bugs and then out of the taps, tastes fine!

First water from the borehole into the house!  You can see the pipe running under the house, but as we had no plumbed in sink I had to send it straight back out the window!

We needed a holding tank for the water to sit until we turned on a tap to use it and this is it!  The tank maintains a pressure of 3.5 bar, if it's ever less than this it is an indication to us that there may be a leak out of the pump at the bottom of the borehole!  This isn't a hot water cylinder tank!

The long mirrored cylinder is a UV light.   When it is connected up to the blue holding tank (below out of shot)  by pipework, all the water will pass through this light before it goes anywhere in the house,  it kills the DNA in the water and as a result any potential water carrying nasties that could make you sick!

This  will be the shower room.  It was like a closet space before, we found a single mattress in it but no plumbing.  There's space to turn round on the spot....but not to swing a cat!  Ahead will be the sink and to the right is the shower cubicle.  Guy had to raise the floor to allow the shower outflow pipe to have enough fall

We're off mains drainage up here, which is hardly surprising! Some pongy whiffs led us to the septic tank about 20m down hill from the house. It was pretty well hidden in the thick of the surrounding undergrowth, a single chamber made of brick with a dodgy lid on the top which allowed the stench to leak out!  Lifting the lid was an unpleasent business and not far beneath it was a crusty layer of waste, Mmm....that really needed some urgent pumping out before it all spilled out, we had no idea when it had last been done, years maybe. We were just hoping that beneath the crusty layer was a liquid layer and beneath that, at the bottom of the tank, the solid waste that we would need to get pumped out, that's how it's supposed to be. Pumping out will happen annually, the heavy solids sink to the bottom of the tank and the bacteria breaks it all down...nice eh!