THIS is an exciting blog post (at least for me it is)!  Last weekend my always-so-helpful parents came out to the farm to help build me a grey water drainage system for the trailer.  For the last two months, I’ve been emptying my grey water tank (sink and shower water) manually (with a bucket) every day or two (depending on how many dishes I washed).  It was not fun.  It was, in fact, quite stinky, splashy and downright inconvenient (especially in the rain).

And so, it is with MUCH fanfare (at least in the form of a blog post) that I give a huge shout-out of thanks to m
y parents because trailer life has become so much lovlier now that I have a drainage system.

What we did:

After some conferring with Chris and Julie, we decided that it made sense to direct my rain water towards the empty side pasture (which is where I’d been manually dumping the grey water).  This seemed simple enough because it meant we only had to dig about 20 feet of drainage ditch space to lay the drainage pipes – and the land naturally declined in that direction. 

However, I’m learning that nothing is ever as simple as it first appears (on a farm).  My mom started digging out the ditch while my dad and I drove to the local hardware shop for some pipes and supplies.  When we got back, she delivered the bad news: she’d hit concrete.  Yes, lying just below the surface of the gravelly space we were digging across lay a big, sloppy, confusing slab of concrete.

Hmmm…it could have been much more problematic for us than it was, but luckily the concrete didn’t go on forever and we were able to redirect the ditch and pipes around the buried concrete barrier.  There was concern that, given the ‘bump’ in the plans, the drainage wouldn’t get completed that day (which, given that I’d already internally celebrated never having to manually empty the grey water tank again was super disheartening), but it turns out my mom is a super gravel digger and, with some late-in-the-game help from Julie and Chris (with Jordan and Kai looking on), we got the ditch dug, the pipes laid, and my drainage complete.  YAY!

Thanks mom and dad.  I love my new drainage system! 

(Ohhh…life in a trailer on a farm – celebrating things like grey water drainage systems…)