I Have Never Been So Happy To Buy Something So Boring

Make the date and time.

Let it be known. I am finally an adult. It only took 42 years, 3 months, and and 21 days.

Why you may ask? Well, if you must know, I have never been so excited to pay not-an-insignificant amount of money for a home repair. You see, I had a very exciting morning yesterday. After what felt like years, but was actually only a little more than two weeks, we finally got our new well pump installed.

Intriguing you say. I know you are dying to know more. Since you really must know all the details, I will go on.

It begins like this:

It might be hard for people who have visited our house to believe but get our water from a well. We do not live out in the country, which is where I always assumed the well-water using people lived. Instead, we only live one block outside of town and everyone on our street has well water.

There are some advantages to having a well, the main advantage being that we control the quality of our water because it comes from the ground instead depending on a municipality to clean and treat our water. Our water tastes pretty good and we do not pay a water bill to our township.

However, on the flip side we have to be a little bit responsible for it. For example, we do have only ourselves to blame if the UV purification system fails or our well malfunctions and we are without water. Every once and a while Mr. Katie and I say to each other, “We should get our water tested”. After we say that, we almost always forget and call only call a professional when we start getting what we deem as too many stomach bugs. Ewww.

It kind of goes with our philosophy thus far of doing relatively little upkeep on our house, which is something that we don’t feel great about but I guess I would prefer having everyday adventures to spending weekends at Home Depot. (Which truthfully could be a fun everyday adventure if I knew very much about home maintenance and repair).

However, lately things have started to catch up with us.

First, our water heater started leaking at the end of October. After a few days of asking myself, “Should a water heater be doing that?” I finally gave a local plumbing company a call. The repair man told me that it was really lucky that I called when it did because our water heater was about to burst and then would have been a really big problem.

Luckily, he was quick and very professional. He had our water heater replaced and working in a few short hours. I should have remembered that he was a real professional because it might have saved me a lot of time. But we will come back to him later.

Right before the repairman left, he told both me and my husband that we needed to get our well pump looked at as soon as possible because it was leaking and it would not last much longer.

I got right on the well pump problem. And when I say that I got right on the well pump problem I mean I started making calls about it the next morning.

I did not exactly know who to start calling about our well, but I called a plumber I found online and is has a Coopersburg address. However he was a little gruff and could not seem to hear me on the phone and told me that we would probably need to replace the entire well pump system. We had barely talked on the phone and he told me that we would probably want to convert our well pump to the more expensive but longer lasting submersible pump. After discussing it with Mr. Katie, I opted not to send him the pictures of our well that he asked me to text him.

I was a little put off after talking to Mr. Pushy plumber so it was a godsend when talked to a representative from the next plumbing company. The John, service person from Journeyman* Plumbing (not his or the company’s real name) was calm, collected and could understand me on the phone. We set up a time for him to come to our house, early the next week, and I even had Mr. Man stay home from his gymnastics class so we could fit the visit in.

In person, John was as professional as he had been on the phone. He looked at all the relevant places, the well pump, which is in our basement and the area we thought where our well was located our backyard. Great.

He gave us a quote for two options for repairing our well pump plus some additional work towards softening our hard water. Depending on the option we selected, the quotes ran between $8,000-$11,000. Ekkk! That was far more than we planned on paying and he also wanted to convert our system to a submersible pump . Mr. Katie saw some well pumps on the Home Deposit website, which might not be as nice as the ones a plumbing company might put in, for $800.

So needless to say, we decided to get a second opinion.

Luckily, I found another nice seeming company online and after two phone calls, because my the first person I spoke to didn’t call me back after I sent some well pictures, another well person came to our house.

At this point, it had been a week since the water heater repairman said that our well pump wasn’t long for the world.

This repairman, let’s call him Paul, had a much more promising idea of how much their repair could cost. He said he could not give me an idea though until he got a quote from the parts company. He told me to sit tight because it might take a few days. I said sure, it was a Thursday when we spoke.

Then when I did not heard back from him by the following Tuesday afternoon, I gave him a call. He was out of the office on Tuesday afternoon as well on Wednesday, according to his receptionist. On Thursday morning when I called, I bet your thought I forgot about you, but he said he hadn’t he just had not gotten hold of the parts dealer.

I was starting to get anxious because Paul, on his visit to our house a week prior, led me to believe that our well pump could and possibly would stop working at any moment. Then he told me to sit tight while he took a few days to some up with a quote.

By last Friday morning, I was starting to feel very anxious every time I thought about the well pump situation. I knew that I would have to try to reach Paul and so far, he either didn’t pick up or have any answers for me. Also I was starting to believe that our well pump would fail any minute.

Which brought me to Friday morning, when his receptionist told me that he would not be in that day, I told her that I couldn’t wait around any longer for Paul to try to find me a well pump. I put my well-pump fate back in my own hands when I called two more potential well pump fixers, one that was a promising lead from Mr. Katie and other that I don’t even know how I came up with.

When I received a call back on Saturday morning from Mr. Katie’s promising lead that they could not help us I started to feel desperate.

I WAS STARTING TO GO CRAZY! I was starting to go well crazy which is the boring-est kind of crazy. . .

I started doing some crazy things, like I started making service calls for a non-emergency service on a Saturday.

Thought I was not sure if Saturday was the best day of the week to make a service call, I called the company that put in our new water heater to ask if they could help us. Awesomely enough, someone answered and told me that while they do not service wells, they recommended another company that located relatively locally.

The water heater people should have been our first call. I am but an egg!

[Lesson learned: if someone does good work on a home repair, remember to ask them if you need something else repaired. If they can’t or don’t do that type of work they might know someone else}

Huzzah!

When I called the company our water heater service people recommended, the answering service told me that on weekends they only do emergencies but they could come out on Monday.

At the time, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take them because I had already done so much leg work on getting our well pump repaired and none of it had panned out thus far.

By some stroke of luck, when I called this company again on Monday at 8:30 am, their receptionist told me they were already on the way to my house. I needed to get dressed. I wasn’t expecting things to go like this. So I quickly got dressed and ready to meet them. This company turned out to be exactly who I needed.

They weren’t as flashy as the first people who came to do the estimate two weeks previous. They didn’t have a tablet and a credit card reader like that group had but what they did have was a jet pump and very clear ideas about how to install it. They did not even try to get us to upgrade to a submersible pump. Huzzah!

They had the pump installed and were ready to leave by 10:30 am. What the other companies couldn’t do in two weeks, this company did in less than an hour and a half.

I could not believe it when they were done. I was so relived. The actual cost ended up being much less than what the first company quoted to us. I have never been so excited to spend money on a home repair.

If you had told me a month ago, that I would have been excited to spend not an insignificant amount of money on a new well pump. I would. have said “What’s a well pump?” then I would have said “That isn’t possible”.

I really was happy on Monday. I was actually probably glowing because I was so glad to be done with the well pump fretting.

The funny part about all of this, if there is a funny part is that my husband took a look at the new well pump and the well pump air tank that is right and he noticed that the company must have serviced the well pump for the previous owners of our house because their sticker was on the tank.

Silly, silly, homeowners!

So many lessons learned, so many more to learn.

[Folks, it is here that I pass on one small tidbit that I learned from this process: If you have a well problem, call a well company as a first resort. Well companies have more specialized knowledge about wells then plumbers do.]

I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could make a boring subject interesting, plus I was super invested in this saga.

Hope all is well,

Katie