Our Dream House: Why ISN'T this pump working????

When the excavation was done, a lot of water accumulated at the bottom of the hole. Scott wanted to pump it out because he was afraid that the surveyor and the framer would not be able to do a proper job with all that water in it. Since we didn't have a temporary electrical pole installed yet, Scott decided to rent a gas powered pump from Home Depot. It was a really huge, heavy-duty machine. So when he got there, he couldn't bring it down to the bottom by himself. He had it on the top and then put the hose down to the water to pump. Good idea huh? Except that it didn't work!

Where did all this water come from?

After fiddling for 4 hours, Scott claimed that Home Depot gave him a broken machine. The next day, he went back to Home Depot to get another pump. And after working on it for another 3 hours, it still didn't work. He claimed this time, that it was too high and there wasn't enough for power to pump the water out. So the second pump went back.

On Saturday while I took Kaiden to his music class, Scott went and bought two pumps from Rona and got some parts from Home Depot. He had to take his two helpers along...

Except that they were more trouble than helpful.

When I got home, I took care of the kids while Scott went back to the site to try out the new pumps. After a couple of hours, he concluded that pump #3 didn't work. He got it on sale so it must've been defective. He went back to Rona to return that.

Onto pump #4! After playing with it for a while and trying different things, he decided to read the manual. It turned out that he was supposed to add cooking oil to it first before using it. He had been adding water so that was why it didn't work! It took him 3 whole days to just remove some water. And we are supposed to be finished in 10 months??? It's a good thing we are hiring professionals to do the other jobs!

Now that the water situation is under control, we are finally moving along...