Turned turtle

Not sure exactly what image comes to mind when you read that something turned turtle, but I'll bet you never imagined a concrete septic tank floating upside down in a 6-foot deep hole?  Yeah, me neither!  However, we seem to learn many lessons the hard way, like when the septic guy says to be sure to fill your septic tank with water so it doesn't float away when it rains, he means... fill it to the top!

Oh, we filled it with water alright, or at least it seemed like we must have by now...and it couldn't possibly float away with a little rain...right?  That was our second mistake.  Not making sure it was  FULL was the first.

Let's back up a moment,  Brian and Ken finally did make it back to the property with our tractor in tow.  You see that was our plan to help save some money; by digging the septic system ourselves!  But with all the trees to fell and the ginormous rocks and huge root balls that had to be dug out to install our field, we wisely bailed on the idea that was something we could handle - at least in a timely fashion; so we hired Ken to get the field ready with our tractor.

After spending one whole day trying to repair Ken's truck and then another day fetching our tractor, the next day was spent replacing all the fluids and filters on our tractor to get her in shape for the project ahead, which took an entire day,  now we are on day 4 of a one week project and have yet to begin work on digging the hole for the septic tank!  The hole had to be dug and leveled in order to have the tank and lines delivered.  Day 4 happened to be a Friday, and with the 3 hour round trip each day for Ken and Devon to get to our job,  they were behind on some of their own farm work, so Ken didn't make it to our property until late Friday afternoon.   Maggie started right up yeah we are making progress finally! He proceeded down the hill with her and almost as soon as he got her into the position she blew a huge hydraulic hose. Ugh. Are you kidding?

It was pretty much a unanimous decision to cut our losses and ask Ken to bring his own tractor in and just get it done.  By Saturday we had our tank hole ready and the septic guys showed up to set our tank, they left with the warning to be sure and fill it with water.  Ha.  That's no problem, we've got the well running so we dragged the hose over to the tank and started filling her up. But the day was getting late and we were tired.  It had been a really long week. Long drive down, broken axle, broken brake line, broken truck, broken tractor, and we had unloaded the entire trailer just the 2 of us, from the middle of the driveway rather than backed up to the front door (you know we are not so young anymore) did I mention we were tired?

It seemed like surely we should have enough water in the tank by the time we turned off the hose.  Haste makes waste as the old saying goes...we were going to be reminded of this in just a few short hours, but for now, we were more focused on a hot shower! Our lifetime pass to the Army Corp campgrounds was sure coming in handy as we still didn't have running water in the house yet, so we'd head down the road a couple of miles to the one close by for a hot shower. (At least whenever we needed more than what our solar shower could provide.)  This was one of those moments.  We even stopped to eat out because we were too tired to cook, it was seemingly the perfect end to a very long week.  A hot shower, great meal and early to bed.  Ahhh, I think we were sound asleep before our heads hit the pillow.

Sometime during the dark of the night, we woke to the sound of a torrential rainstorm hitting our metal roof. We've never actually experienced a thunderstorm snuggled in bed beneath a metal roof before.  Humm?  To be honest, at that moment I didn't even think much about the septic tank, I was more concerned about the newly graded driveway (sans gravel) and worried it would become a muddy slip and slide.  This was important to me as we were planning to go to church in the morning.

With the light of day though came a troubling sight...the septic tank which was not only set in the hole, it was also hooked up to the sewer pipes we had run under the driveway and out toward the septic field, well folks, it just didn't look quite right! Not only had floated up out of the hole, it had turned turtle rolling around those sewer pipes like a gymnast!  Whaaat?  Seriously?  I felt kind of sick....but what could we do other than wait it out to see what happened when the water went down.  Except of course make that 911 call to the septic guys who set the tank in the first place (with the stern warning to be sure to fill it with water) cause as hard as that call was going to be to make we really needed to know if they would indeed come back out and try to reset it?  I just kept wondering what kind of hit our already strained budget was going to take? 

Some DIY projects meant to save money can sometimes turn into a costly mistake.

Was this going to be one of those times? 

Or was it?