Earlier this year, we decided to get a generator so when the power goes out, at least we’ll have water and heat (both of which are powered by electricity). It seemed simple enough, and I felt like I could just organize a handful of contractors and make it happen. Well, summer is apparently a very busy time for contractors around here, and the pandemic made it worse because everyone’s doing house projects this year. After being ghosted by most of them and turned down flat by others (“the job is too small” and “you’re too far away” were common reasons), we finally opted to just hire a generator company to handle everything.
The only thing they can’t do is install the gas line to get propane to power the generator. We have a thousand-gallon tank buried in our front yard, but (naturally) the generator will be in the back of the house. Somehow we needed to install about 200 feet of piping. I thought I had it all lined up with the gas company two months ago, and last week– literally the day before the project was going to happen– they said they couldn’t do it because we didn’t have a trench dug for the pipe. Umm, what? I thought that was part of what they were doing. Nope, they said– I have to trench it. I was pretty exasperated, and started frantically calling contractors. Everyone was still busy, and it’s November, so the weather is threatening to freeze the ground. If I couldn’t get the trench to lay the pipe, I couldn’t get the generator, and we’d have to wait until the spring thaw.
After failing to secure a contractor, Pepper and I decided to cowboy up and do it ourselves. I rented an excavator (the ground is far too rocky for a simple trencher) and we went to work. This thing wasn’t exactly one of those monster earth-moving machines– it was more like an oversized Tonka toy.
I got the hang of the levers pretty quickly. Pepper gave it a whirl but despite intense concentration, she ended up kind of swinging the bucket around like a drunk construction worker.
So we agreed I’d run the excavator while she did “support work” to make the job faster. There’s nothing quite like tearing up your beautiful lawn just to lay a 3/4″ pipe.
After almost six hours in the chair, breathing diesel fumes and slamming levers around, the trench was finished. We laid the pipe and went to work pushing all that dirt back into the ditch. The excavator was a lifesaver, because it was amazing how much dirt there was.
Once that was done, I had the rare privilege of repairing the sewer line I’d accidentally destroyed. It was unmarked, and fairly shallow, and although it gave up a good fight against the excavator’s hydraulics (I thought I was pulling on a huge rock, which had already happened many times), it eventually exploded into a bunch of PVC shards. I had to dig it out and then cut the pipe. Whee!
After what seemed like hours but was probably about 30 minutes, I had the new pipe installed.
We raked literally tons of dirt, gravel, and rock to tidy up a bit, and the end result of two days’ hard labor isn’t too awful.
I guess I can cross off a couple more things on my “things to do now that I’m a Montanan” list: run an excavator and fix a sewer line. Sheesh, I’ve done more house projects in the past year than I’ve done in the previous forty-seven.
Now we’re just waiting for that generator…