I just read Summers post and read about something I already knew (that Kuta makes her smile). It is funny that she talked about how great Kuta dog is because he was running the show again today. I was so proud of him, he was showing Monkey how to manage the excavator.


Monkey Running the Show

Unfortunately, this is when we ran into some problems. Once the excavator was finished with all of his work today, Jerry and I noticed that the Water Meter was still running…even though we didn’t have any water on anywhere on the property. This could only mean one thing, a broken pipe, but where. Our water main runs 278ft from our front property line to the front of the house. The line is 4ft deep and if you watched this excavation video you know that our land is all rock and rock hard packed dirt. Impossible to dig with a shovel, we need to use a pick for everything. This is when Kuta stepped in and helped Monkey get out of the bind she got us into.


Monkey looks worried, Kuta’s composure projects confidence

We spoke with the excavator and talked him into blowing off his next job (for a fee $) until tomorrow so he could help us dig up the property in search of a leaky pipe. I grabbed some PVC glue and plugged off the line about 3/4 the way to the house (where we installed a spicket), turned on the water and the meter came to a stop after filling up the line. By process of elimination, that left us the 70ft to the house to inspect. Instead of painstakingly digging up the old pipe, the excavator dug another trench while I ran to the Fronteria (two of them, the first place was out) and grabbed 1” PVC pipe, a couple of couplings, elbows and some more Primer/Glue.


The Second Water Main Trench to our House

That pretty much solved the problem, but it took an extra 4 hours with the CAT excavator and put us a day behind on framing the foundation for our blue stone plant boxes that are going to run the length of the porch (minus stone steps through the planter). Jerry’s goal is to have the entire foundation layed, block built, steps built and just getting started on the blue rock facade that we are going to buy from the local quarry before Summer gets to the house on Wednesday night.

Monkeys saving grace today was instructing the Excavator to dig two four foot wide and four foot deep trenches at the top of where we cut into the earth for our flat front yard and one at the bottom. She then had the Excavator drop all of the rock and brown stone from those holes in the woods and replace the rock with fertile topsoil from down by the cabrata (stream). This will allow us some easier digging, planting and growing when we start planting the hell out of some lush vegetation afterwhich we will start watering it with our non-leaky water main which has spicket about every 100 feet down our property to the house (run on sentences are legal in Puerto Rico).

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