I’ve got a semi-final house plan. You can see it by clicking the 12 sided, 8′ walls on the right under “The Progression of Design”.
Building one pod at a time, I’ll do the master bedroom/laundry/office pod first. This pod is closest to the power and driveway and is logically the first to be constructed. We have a movable 12×24′ building that can be the living room/kitchen until the second pod is constructed.
We should start deconstructing the pump house this week. We have a couple weeks work to do on the well before we can start constructing the new papercrete walls around the storage tanks and pumps. I want the building to be big enough I can have storage shelves for fruit and vegetables, canning and latex paint. I also want it to be somewhere other than the top of the well so if I have to pull the pump I don’t have to disassemble the building. I learned that lesson.
I got the opportunity to talk to a friend’s father who work for a pump company. He walked through my needs and we came up with and incremental working plan.
- pump the well as dry as we can
- clean the bottom of the well, including the sides, getting out all the mud and old debris
- rehang the pump closer to the bottom of the well
- build a new well cover
- pour the base for the new pump house
- install the pressure tank and new (only new thing added at this point) cutoff switch/timer for when the water level drops below the pump.
- pour the walls for the pump house and apply the roof.
Once we can afford another pump and the few additional electrics we need, I’ll plumb the storage tanks with the float and switch, re-plumb the well pump to bypass the pressure tank and pump into the storage tanks, plumb a new shallow well pump to the pressure tank and storage tanks. The only final addition will be a filtering system. Henry recommended a particulate tank between the well pump and the storage tanks to allow the larger particulates from the well to settle out. In addition to this I want a sanitizing filter. Given we have a shallow well with exposed earth walls and no liner, I think a filter is essential. Plus when it rains hard the water tastes like dirt . . . a filter will fix that as well.
We’re getting there, one step at a time.