A new week...

Back at Ashfield today. Temperatures are still below zero, but the boiler there is fixed - and the place needs sorting. We called in one night to check on it and to our dismay found water gushing out all over the floor through the whole building. So Ian's job today will be moving desks and taking up carpets. I'm so glad that didn't happen at home.

My jobs today are drawing plans for a neighbours barn conversion, putting up posters for the oil painting course, and cleaning the church (i'm on the rota). Our church is great - it's a little Assemblies of God in Llandrindod called New Life. They are so warm and friendly and have made a very big difference to how we feel about being here. They are also great worshippers and reach out to the community including those struggling with things like drugs and alcohol. It's a very comfortable place to be, and we are grateful to God for leading us here through contacts in Taunton and Llandod.

Enough procrastinating. It's time to stop distracting myself with other activities and sit down with those plans....

Drains!

Having just spent 2 weeks at home I'm feeling a bit of a fraud writing a blog called 'My Wales' when all I write about is our house in Somerset! I am absolutely loving our renovation project - it is the best job I have ever had. What an opportunity to redesign a house from scratch, and the garden.... I feel so peaceful whenever I am there and love every bit of it. This week I have been mapping all the physical features - trees etc so we can keep a record of the drains and water pipes we have been laying, and collect the names of the trees as we discover them.

This is where the engineer in me and all those years looking at plans is coming in useful. I don't seem to be able to think without a plan in front of me. We have sadly wrecked the lawn and laid pipes from the borehole to the shed, up to the house, and down to the veg patch, and put french drains in the lawn. Digging the trenches revealed why it was like a paddling pool last winter - the ground is solid clay except for a couple of inches of topsoil where the water sits. Now, hopefully, it will trickle through the gravel into the perforated pipes and run down to the field where we will one day - hopefully - have a pond. I can't wait for rain to see if it's working! Apologies to those who might find drainage boring - that was me too until this week!

Roger digging the trench across the lawn - 0.8m deep so the water doesn't freeze on its way to the house

then perforated drainage pipe laid 200mm below the surface -

and backfilled with gravel, then topsoiled and seeded (thanks Dad x)

....all under the watchful eye of freddy frog

Water!

I feel like we should be having a party - what an amazing thing to see actual water coming out of the ground - even pouring out of the ground for a while and running down the old stream bed towards the waiting field drain underneath Mike's maize. Eddie the borehole man drilled to 130 ft through the 'Mercia Mudstone' beneath our garden at Pengotton (and most of Taunton Deane) to two underground watercourses which had been earlier located by Eddie's wife and her mate with a pair of bent copper rods and a hazel stick. Yes we were sceptical, even after having a go ourselves and feeling the rods turn to cross each other, and a small part of me still wants to know if we would have found water anywhere else we might have tried.

Anyway, for now they are the experts and water is now apparently sitting at 40 ft down our pipe waiting for us to pump it up. That's a depth of 90 feet of water to the bottom of the hole from which we could extract 20 gallons a minute. That's 21,600 gallons every day - a lot of baths! Dad wants to know if he can pipe it over to the farm for the cows - no problem except the pipe might cost more than another borehole. I find it amazing that in this country private users can extract up to 20 tonnes of water a day without a license, and also that it's free apart from the electricity for running the pump. We still have to have it tested of course before drinking, and it needs to be pumped till it runs clear. I was imagining clear sparkling blue water shooting up like a fountain, but it was more a spurt of clay-red liquid. It's not quite an artesian well but it's definitely there.