A Disaster Averted

 Last week I went with Gary on another well job.  This time it was to our neighbor-across-the-river.  Mary G. is in her 70s, lives alone, though her boyfriend, as it were, lives just around the corner from her a ways.  He is in his 80s.  But Mary had back surgery here a couple of weeks ago, so while she can maneuver around, she has to be very careful.  

She has chickens and Guinea fowl, and they need water.  But her outside water source in the well house below is/was a spigot underneath the tank there as you can see below.  You can't really tell in the pic, but that door is rather narrow.

So she wanted Gary to install an outside spigot so she would be able to water her flock by herself instead of calling on Carl, or other neighbors to help her.  So off we went.

This pic is where he is cutting back an elderberry bush.  

Things were going along swimmingly until he went to remove the old spigot so he could install the fittings to attach the new hose to get it from the tank to the spigot on the wall.

When he went to unscrew it, the whole shebang broke off flush with the pipe attached to the tank. Here it is on the well house.

You can sort of see where it was in the bottom pic, the darkness there at the joint to the left of the pipe pointing toward the door 

Below you can see where it was, right under the pressure I dictator thingy...haha, whatever it's called.

This is one of those situations where a half hour job can turn into a nightmare of several hours because if you can't remove the broken piece from the connection there you can't install the new fitting.  And the pipe that needs replaced is the one going to the bottom of the pressure tank, which means removing the entire blue tank there, which means pretty much deconstructing the nice well house, which means lots of time and potentially backbreaking work.  Just for a little cheap john, as Gary would say, fitting.  This means now she's completely out of water for her whole place until it's fixed.  

However.

Gary has several different tools to attempt to remove the broken piece in the connection.  

They weren't working.

So he got out a simple file and cut notches into the broken piece.  This either cut it up, or allowed the tool to catch the notches and remove it.

In any case, it worked:

There's a piece of it.  I was so happy to see that.

He finished installing it all.  Now Mary can water her poultry herself!  She was so thankful. (So were we, but for other things as well.)

While we were there Gary also changed the house water filter in her basement.

And I got to see Week Willie, her new kitty

And also Joseph P Cock, who wandered around while we were working. 

He's in the process of growing back his tail feathers after molting.

And of course we got to visit with a neighbor and help her out.  It was a good afternoon.