The well driller showed up on Monday, June 29. I heard the rig so I went up to the lot and looked. Here it is at work.

This is a Bucyrus-Erie cable drilling rig. It’s nearly as old as I am, and it’s in operation in this video by the fourth generation in a well-drilling family. According to the young fellow working the rig, it belonged to the grandfather of the current owner, who passed it to his son, who passed it to his son. Now the young fellow, who married the owner’s step-daughter, is using it. He said it dates to 1955, although the truck it’s mounted on probably dates to around 1970.

Cable drilling rigs are obsolescent, if not obsolete. They have been largely replaced by rotary drilling rigs, which, according to what I have read, drill holes significantly faster than the brute-strength method of a cable rig. The cable rig raises a heavy steel pipe with a bit on the end and drops it repeatedly. There is no rotation of the bit, so the bit drives through the earth and rock simply by pulverizing it.

In the last part of the video, you can see another steel pipe resting at an angle in a larger metal pipe. The operator periodically pulls the drilling bit out and drops the other pipe in. There is a trip mechanism at the end of the other pipe which opens the end when it reaches the bottom of the hole, so it lets the slurry into the hollow pipe. Then, as it’s raised, the trip mechanism closes the valve and the operator brings it up to dump the slurry. It runs out through the open end of the larger section of pipe and then down the hill. Then the operator drops the drilling pipe back in, puts some fresh water in, and begins drilling again.

This is some of the slurry from early in the drilling process. It’s lighter and not as red as the overlying soil. That means it came from the upper layer of sandstone, which varies in color from white to brown to reddish. This slurry was gritty from the pulverized sandstone.

Later on the slurry was darker. The operator said that came from a layer of dirt beneath the upper rock layer. And then after that, there was some lighter slurry with a mixture of larger rock pieces, which came from a lower, harder rock layer that didn’t turn into sand when the bit pulverized it.

This type of rig is based on a drilling rig patented back in the mid-1860’s. Bucyrus-Erie bought the rights to it some decades later. The rigs were used not only to drill water wells, but also to drill oil wells, back when oil well depths were measured in just a couple of thousand feet.

Bucyrus-Erie apparently sold its cable rig manufacturing to another company which continues to offer parts for old rigs like this one.

Petroleumhistory.org has an informative description of cable drilling rigs as well as information about Bucyrus-Erie. I would say it’s interesting, but that’s probably a matter of opinion.

This old rig is slowly drilling its way into the earth. As of Wednesday, I can still open the door and hear the rig working down the street at our new house site. The same rig was used to extend our neighbor’s well to 450 feet after they had some well problems. Our current well is less than 300 feet deep, but we have never had any hint of supply problems, even back a few summers ago when we had a fairly severe drought. I don’t know how deep the new well will go, but we will probably be conservative about it, which means deep.

We had the basement and garage slabs poured for the new house on Monday, June 22. This is the final step required before framing can begin.

At 7:30 that morning we heard the concrete trucks turning around just outside the house on Wildlife Trail so they could aim directly up the drive instead of having to make a sharp right-hand turn coming up from Fouche Gap Road. I walked and fed the dogs, grabbed a quick bowl of cereal and then went up to see things. David and his two helpers were about halfway through the basement pour.

In this shot you can see several significant things. First, of course, the truck is dumping concrete down the chute while one worker directs the pour and the second spreads it. The gravel base is covered with plastic. David (wearing the orange head wrap) is standing close to a screed, the long piece of metal that looks like a 2X4. Just behind the man holding the concrete chute is a depression in the gravel with two pieces of rebar (reinforcing bar), which is used to strengthen the concrete so it can support a load-bearing wall. In the foreground you can see that a cut-off plastic bucket has been placed around one of the plastic plumbing stubs. That is where a shower or tub drain can go if we ever decided to put a bathroom in the basement. The bucket allows some adjustment of the placement of the pipe if necessary. You can’t see a large metal tub that was placed around the potential future toilet flange because the flange was installed slightly too shallow. That will allow the flange to be cut off and reinstalled at the right height. The area that has no concrete because of the bucket and the tub can be filled later with concrete mix from a sack.

The two other plumbing pipes in the foreground are a main stack (draining the two bathrooms) and a shorter stub that can drain a basement bathroom sink. There is a second stub against the far wall to drain the kitchen fixtures.

What you can’t see is that the main stack and the basement sink drain are almost two feet off in placement. That happened because the plumber got his locations by measuring directly off the floor plan, which indicates that the scale is ¼ inch to the foot. Unfortunately, the floor plans did not print out at that scale, so the pipes ended up in the wrong place. It’s a glitch, but one that can be worked around. Obviously, all future measurements have to be taken directly from the plan dimensions rather than by using a ruler and scaling a foot to each quarter of an inch.

Here one of David’s workers is using a powered concrete trowel to finish the basement floor.

I didn’t stay around to watch all the pour or finishing work; it was too hot. I don’t know how David and his helpers did it. It was in the 90’s before noon, and they were working in full sunlight the whole time. And they’re all old guys (probably not as old as me, but I’m not doing concrete work). But they did it.

Our next step is finding a framer. I should have settled this weeks ago, but no. I have found three potential framers. One has given an estimate. The second, who did neighbor John’s house, picked up a set of plans Thursday and will, I hope, give us an estimate by the weekend. A third promised an estimate by Wednesday, but I haven’t received it yet.

My lack of foresight is probably going to cost us nearly a month’s delay in starting framing. I hope I can get some other work done in that time, including the well and the septic system.

On Monday neighbor John and his helper (the graders) and David and his helpers (the concrete workers), prepared the basement and garage floors for pouring concrete. John did quite a bit of grading with his skid-steer loader, skimming high places and pulling gravel back into lower spots.

That’s a laser level in the foreground.

The rest of the workers used shovels and a purpose-made rake to pull gravel around. This is David. You may not be able to tell, but his arms are about as big as my legs. That’s what happens when you work with concrete for years.

When I built the house we live in now, I did all that work by myself with my skid-steer loader. When I was done back then, I called David to do the concrete pour and finishing. When I look back on what I did on our current house, I think I must have been either very naïve or fairly competent. I’m not sure which.

The temperature Monday was in the lower 90s before lunch, although the official temperature as shown online was only around 88 then. The only work I did was to walk around and pick up pieces of wood and wire from the gravel, but I was pretty thoroughly dehydrated by evening.

David is supposed to put up forms for the basement and garage slabs on Tuesday. If everything goes according to schedule, I’ll call the inspection department for an inspection of the preparations. The actual pour will probably happen on Wednesday, assuming the inspector OK’s everything Tuesday.

As of Monday night, the forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday was for a high of 97. I’m going to get hot just watching.

This is all encouraging progress, but over the weekend we had even more encouraging news: the family that was interested in buying our house has agreed to do so. We arrived at a price I think both of us (buyers and sellers) felt comfortable with. We don’t have it in writing yet, because we don’t have a good closing date, but I think we’ll probably pick a conservative date and then go for it.

We continue to work on finishing the basement. Leah has almost completed staining the doors, and I stained the windows. The downstairs bathroom looks almost complete now, with a light fixture and a mirror over the vanity, and a working toilet in the corner. When I walked away from it Sunday afternoon, I had a flashback to when I was finishing our current house. It was to the point that small increments of progress began to add up to make a significant difference in the look of the rooms. That feels good.

Leah and I had a plan. We would build a house, and then sell our current house. Simple, right? Of course we didn’t expect the details to be quite so simple. Building a house is a complicated process and, as we are learning, more expensive than we might have anticipated.

We fully expected the sale of our house to be a fairly long process. Rome is not a booming real estate market under the best of circumstances, and selling a house this far from town is not the best of circumstances. Not everyone wants to live up here. A surprise, I know. We didn’t really know how long it might take to sell, but I was expecting months rather than weeks.

And then last week we got a call from a family planning to build a house below us, between our property and neighbor John’s. They had sold their house and rented a nearby house through the real estate broker who handled the sale of my parents’ house and our purchase of the property we are now building on. He told these people that we planned to sell our house, and maybe they should take a look at it.

So, on Sunday, they did. It turns out that the house they have been planning to build looks a lot like ours. They liked what they saw, and left saying that they were going to hold off on seeking more estimates from contractors to build their new house.

They seemed genuinely interested and we all agreed that it would be a good thing for everyone if we could reach an agreement. As of now, we haven’t sold and they haven’t bought. It might not happen. All sorts of things could happen instead. But wouldn’t it be nice?

How’s that for a coincidence?