The earth shook under our feet

So today the well drillers were showing up early in the morning to get started trying to get me some water. I decided to get out to the property and take some early morning photos. I setup my camera and took some pictures of my field as the sun was rising up through the trees.

Here is where the house is going to go. We are facing where the front door will be. It is difficult to see my stakes (they are green and don't stand out as well as the surveyors stakes). The stakes you can see pretty easily are each about 12 feet closer to the camera than my markers. The surveyor put in wood stakes with yellow flags.

The sun was playing through the trees and painting the landscape, and I was just enjoying the view.

Here is the house location from the west property line. This is facing toward where the garage door will be.

Another picture of just enjoying a beautiful fall morning. Someday I will be able to walk up on my roof, and sit among various wild flowers and enjoy this view and listen to the birds singing their songs in the morning.

Then I spotted that I had a couple guests. Actually they were in the neighbor's field, but this is why I made sure my camera had a good zoom lens when I bought it.

Make that three guests. Can you find all three?

Here is a nicer view of just the one deer.

 

So, after the photo session with the deer, Newt called. He and the drillers were on the way. The driller had some difficulty getting his truck up the drive. The drive will definitely need some work. We showed the drillers where I was thinking the well would make sense. We made sure that the well would be far enough from where the house was going that concrete trucks would have room to drive around the excavation for the house in the future. We are going to try to minimize how many times we need a cement pump truck, they are expensive each time they show up. While they got the rig setup Newt and I went and got some breakfast. We found a nice little place just a few miles away, with some pretty decent food at a pretty reasonable price.

By the time we got back, they had the rig setup and were drilling.

The rig they have, has been drilling wells for a lot of years. It basically has a large steel rod with a bit on the end, and it lifts it up a few feet, and drops it into the ground. Then every so often, they lift it out of the hole, pour some water down the hole, and lower a hollow pipe that acts like a bucket, and they pull the mud out of the hole with that. Then they put the drill back in the hole and keep going. Each time the drill goes down and hits the bottom of the hole, the ground shakes. They hit rock about 17 feet into the ground. You could feel the vibrations in the ground change when that happened. They had to change to a different bit, one designed to drill through the rock. Then it was back to pounding a hole into the ground.

The rock slows down the drilling, but hopefully it will also give me a good quallity well. We shall see. Tomorrow I am going to go out to the property again, and see how the well is going. At least with the rock 17 feet down, the excavation of the house, probably won't run into rock.