Chaotic Cottage Opening

We're at the cottage for the first time of the season and was greeted to quite the welcoming. Debbie took some pics but we don't have the linking cable. I'll make sure to get some up soon.

We lost two trees over the winter. One was perfectly healthy but sheered off about 20 feet up. The trunk shattered when it hit the ground but the top bit of it clipped the corner of the cottage. The damage doesn't look to bad - no water is coming in anyway, but I'm going to have to doing some roof repair this summer. Meh, it was due for shingling anyway. The other tree pulverized our septic line and glanced of the back shed. The shed is toast, but it was just an old outhouse that I converted anyway. It's no loss and provides another good summer project.

My son's, Mike and Sean, were a great help repairing the septic line and we got that back together yesterday morning. I then spent the rest of the day wrestling with the water pump. We simply draw our water from the lake. It got started with little difficulty and was running fine for a few hours. Then Debbie noticed it came on but wasn't shutting off. Turned out that I had too much line on the float at the foot of the water line and it was sucking mud off the bottom. I then spent the next few hours trying to get it going again, but it never seemed to be building enough pressure. I thought it was a loss of prime, but by the end of the day it seemed clear there was something more wrong and I resigned myself that I would be taking the thing apart the next day.

This morning my brother-in-law came over (he's far more mechanical then me) and we proceeded to take the pump apart. He guessed the problem before we even began and we soon discovered a small piece of quartz, no more than a few millimeters across, wedged in the venturi valve. Pebble removed, pump re-assembled and primed, many thanks to my brother-in-law, and the thing working fine again. The gunk from the bottom of the lake had worked its way into the plumbing though. Most of it flushed out fine but the float cut-off in the toilet doesn't work now, but with everything closed now, this will have to wait for another weekend.

I haven't even started clearing the mess from the trees yet. And I thought cottages were supposed to be relaxing.