We’re currently living in my parents’ house while getting it ready to sell, since they’ve moved to an independent living community in the city. Dad was a “maker” long before the Internet came along and coined the term, and this house was his magnum opus. He pretty much bought some books and read them, and then started building. It’s a pretty unique house with a lot of cool stuff about it, but there are some little details where you can tell he hadn’t had a lot of experience before. One of those is the master bedroom shower.
It’s a big, awesome shower, with two shower heads on opposite walls, a lighted panel set into the back wall, a built-in bench, and a “sauna” feature. But the faucets are…wonky. They don’t all follow the usual “righty tighty lefty loosey” convention for adjusting the flow, so I’m forever scalding or freezing myself when I try to adjust the water temperature, because I can’t ever remember which ones turn which way. So today I pulled out some acrylic scraps and fixed the problem.
Now I’m ready for my next shower! Which may be a while, because the Arctic weather of the past week took out the pump in our well, and there’s only one well guy in the whole county, and he’s up to his ears in emergency work right now…sigh
We do have a box around the temperature-vulnerable parts, with a heat lamp in it that we turn on in cold weather. The pump is down inside the well, though, too far down for it to freeze. I’m not sure what it was about the temperatures that took it out; maybe just being on its last legs already, and some kind of additional stress on it caused by the effects of the cold on the rest of the system?
A sump pump might be a temporary fix to at least have haulable water as needed, that would beat drawing from the lake. My guess is that pumping against ice blocked pipes might be wearing.
That’s a good question, and I don’t know if my solution will be adequate, since I can’t really test it yet. I used some of that rubbery 2-sided removable tape stuff I found in a drawer – no idea how it will hold up, but it seemed like it should be waterproof, so…?
