Towards the end of the summer, everything that needs doing, needs doing all at once. The push is on to beat the weather before the established seasonal cold sets in, and the push to winterize EVERYTHING.

This summer I started an addition on my cabin to make some more space, a bathroom (eventually!), and a bedroom for me so that the kids can have the attic, one on each end. I have it to the point that it is insulated and plastic covered on the inside and the Tyvek on the outside. Flooring has been started but nothing else has progressed with school, outings, field trips, town trips, weekend SAR courses, sick kids….

A couple of weeks ago I started to notice that the water in my tap smelled. I thought maybe it was my drainage, but no, it got worse and I could smell it when I turned the tap on. It smelled like poo. I tried boiling some but the smell did not boil off. And it was brownish. I figured there was a bacteria bloom in the cistern but I had 3 day field trip with my kids and their school, a course the whole weekend before that and 2 town trips to do, so I bleached it until I could get around to draining it. That helped with the poo smell but now the bleach smell was strong.

The next weekend I got up early enough before the kids woke up and set up to drain the cistern. I have to unhook it from my pump and hook it up to the hose and lay it to drain downhill.

While that was draining, I set up to pump water so I could flush it out while it was draining so that the incoming water could scour the sides of the cistern at the same time and flush it out fast. Pump, intake hose, and 2 pvc hoses all needed to be taken down the hill to the river and attached together to my waterline from my cistern shed.

After I filled and flushed it, I opened the top and started scrubbing the inside walls of the tank to flush out any remaining sediment. I found out why the water was off. There was a decaying mouse in the tank. I won’t describe the details, it was gross, and at the stage of being so waterlogged it was falling apart. I had to push it to the outflow hose and get it to drain down the hill and then I filled the tank again and poured the rest of the bottle of bleach in the tank and let it sit for a few hours.

Flush, drain, flush, drain…several times before I felt okay with filling it for use again. Each time I have to run up and down the hill to either start the pump, monitor the tank so it doesn’t overfill, or shut off the pump.

Bloody hell. But it’s done. My water smells and tastes good and looks clear and clean. It took a good part of the day to accomplish.

Now it’s time to get to work on storing lumber and doing the last loads of firewood for the season.