Learning a new skill - Plumbing

Well, the last 2 days have been.... interesting. We've been trying to hook our new house up to our stainless steel tank, rather than to mains water which the builders did. It seemed like an easy enough job in the beginning. Cut a few pipes, join in a few new ones, no big deal.

Which might have been the case if it weren't for the fact that all the pipes were under the ground, and not at all where we expected them to be. I should have paid more attention when they were laying them, but at the time, with a 3yo demanding my attention, it didn't even occur to me.

So after several hours of digging holes all over the yard, trying to work out where on earth the pipes actually went, and which direction the water was flowing in, we managed to put a mattock through a pipe. Bound to happen I guess, but very stressful at the time, involving much swearing and angst. Luckily it wasn't a particularly bad pipe to hit, if you had to hit one. This is the pipe that takes the water from the gutters to the water tank, so not high flow, and most importantly, not sewerage (the sewerage pipes go nowhere near this area, that at least I was sure of!) We made the wonderful discovery that there are fibreglass patches available for just this occurrence, which saved us much cutting of pipes and more swearing. Thank goodness for the helpful staff at Bunnings!

Finally, after disconnecting many pipes, and finding out which taps no longer worked when disconnected, we managed to work out which pipes were which. Then we decided to sleep on the problem, and the next morning, we managed to actually change over the pipes! This shows the mains water now diverted up to a stopper on the end of the pipe (later to become a mains tap, just in case we need it), and the tank water joined straight through to the house. A brief test seems to show that we're now running on tank water, but we need to change our carbon block filter before the final test.

We also spent the afternoon sweeping out all the mud/clay that had been traipsed into the house in the last few weeks, and scraping all the drips of paint/putty that was in lumps on the concrete, meaning we're all ready for the floors to go in on Thursday. It's starting to seem like we might actually get to move into this house after all!